A very important aspect of an Agile process includes the scrum team retrospective. It is designed to help the team with a very important lean Agile principle – Continuous Improvement.
The team get’s together at the end of each sprint and talks about what went well in the last sprint and what they can improve on. Ideally, a lot goes well and couple minor things go bad (and of course it wasn’t the teams fault!). But all too often it can turn into a frustrated venting session, if process related things are not going well. It can go off the rails quickly, as dev managers or scrum masters try to defend or define process items on the fly. This can lead to disagreements and different perspectives.
If you know what I mean or have even had minor situations, I have a suggestion that can help. I’ve used this many times successfully. Keep a log of process related questions, suggestions or general ideas. So when one comes up in the retrospective, simply say, “Let’s log this item and address it later, so we can stay focused on last Sprint.”
Now of course, this means that this log will grow. And if you don’t address it, it will add to the frustration level even more. Make sure you setup some time each sprint with the key decision makers or the team and choose priority items from the log and close on them. We found this was the best way to make progress, without trying to conquer everything at once or on the fly.
When a decision is made, surely some folks are not going to agree. You can suggest they try it for a while and gain more feedback. Something that isn’t working can be adjusted again in the future. And that is one of the keys to success – a method to incorporate feedback, make changes and leave it open for future change. Do this effectively and you will foster a team of continuous improvement.
Work-Agile 