Are your retrospectives getting boring and monotonous with dis-engaged team members?
It could be that you have mastered high performance and your teams have no room for improvement…. although I doubt that is the case. In fact, I believe teams can get better indefinitely.
So how do you keep the retrospectives productive over time?
First of all, let’s start by describing the objectives of retrospective meetings. Retrospectives are a Lean/Agile – “continuous improvement” mindset. We acknowledge that we can always get better at what we do, and one of the best ways to do this is “retrospect” on what we have done, discuss it and log action items so that we have the best chance of making improvements.
If team members don’t value these, it could very well be because they don’t have the “continuous improvement” value baked into their mindset. And it also could be because they are not given the expectation that they do need to improve and held accountable when they don’t. I’ve seen far too many teams that get rewarded constantly and are never really told that they are doing well, but should find ways to improve. So, what do they do? they feel good and go about their business as-is and never really make a serious effort to find improvement areas. You need to both reward and challenge constantly.
That said, here are some easy to implement techniques to boost your Retrospectives:
- If you are not already, use a tool to simplify the logging and tracking of comments. easy-retro.io is a good one.
- Whenever someone enters a comment that is more of a result (good or bad), make sure you ask how it happened
- A simple question template is: “ What did you do differently this time around to get this result”
- If you are not getting responses, ask people directly that may have input on an item.
- Present examples of both good and bad work items or bugs and ask how the result was achieved:
- “This story was a great example, we vertically sliced, tested and released. How was this achieved?”
- “This P1 bug wasn’t a great look and required time for a hotfix”. What happened to get us there.
- Use a log and track action items. Then show progress on these. If the scrum team doesn’t see progress, it’s quite easy for them to want to dis-engage because they don’t feel like they are being heard or no action will come of it anyway.
Retrospectives can be both uncomfortable and a bit tedious. It takes a good scrum master to make the best of the time and ensure that they are effective. I hope using the tactics mentioned here will help you shift gears and get more from your retros!
Work-Agile 