The Optimal Retrospective
This article isn’t about whether Agile teams should have a retrospective meeting or not. There is plenty of material on that already. I’ll assume that it is generally accepted practice to ensure the team communicates and finds ways to continuously improve. This post is about achieving the BEST possible retrospective meetings and how to achieve them.
A valuable retro meeting strives to get a team to share their experiences (good and bad) with each other, log it and discuss approaches to either continue with the good or eliminate the bad. Seems logical, right?
After coaching many teams for a long time, I do realize that it can be very difficult to have the meetings sprint after sprint and continue to achieve strong results. Why is this? Here are few common reasons that might resonate with you:
- Management pressures to “get back to work” and have less meetings
- A team that is not engaged enough in the process
- A moderator that has difficulty getting the team to engage and communicate
So with these challenges there are plenty of techniques and experiments that can help. Changing up the format, making it more fun, asking the right questions, pulling up good and bad stories for discussion – are just a few examples. A new or inexperienced Scrum Master can certainly run productive retros and get team value from them.
However, I’d like to explore in more detail what is needed to run the “optimal” retro and what skills are needed for this. From a manager’s perspective, these meetings are expensive. 30-60 minutes every two weeks for the entire team. So how do they know they are getting the best bang for their buck so to speak? And from a team’s perspective, they also want to make the best use of their time invested, so they can continue to improve their productivity.
Coaching as Part of a Retro
As an Agile Coach, this might sound a bit self-serving but I do believe this is truly the best way to maximize the value of a retro. Teams certainly get trained at various times, but at some point it’s “show time” and sprints continue perhaps for months or even quarters with no additional training or even a refresh of the principles and values that a team should be using as their compass. And as most companies experience, teams change constantly – someone new or someone leaves. So adding value to a retro would be using the real-life examples of an operating team to “coach on demand” best practice and suggested approaches.
An Agile Coach, Chief Scrum Master, or senior level Scrum Master can really lend their skills and experience to help teams at this point. With the retro happening at the end of each sprint and essentially a real-life examples of how the team is performing, it lends the perfect time to sprinkle some “coaching” or a refresh of how the team should be trying to perform (in a Lean/Agile way). If someone at the helm does not quite have enough experience to drive these opportunistic conversations, then the potential for for additional value is lost.
As an Agile Coach, whenever I observe a team’s retro, I inevitably ask certain questions and then give high level of guidance or coaching. I don’t hit them over the head with it but I will try to back up any point with some examples of how they could be thinking to improve.
Asking the Right Questions
Having been a part of hundreds of retro meetings and worked with dozens of teams over the years, I won’t say I’ve seen it all, but I certainly have many experiences and examples of challenges to reflect upon. This helps to ask the right questions from team members and to determine quite quickly some of the hurdles and challenges they are facing. This can’t be taught, it has to be learned over time. So in turn, a junior Scrum Master may miss plenty of opportunities to shine a light on the real issues and use that to set the stage for a coaching opportunity and advancing the team more rapidly.
Summary
The BEST retros expose the most important issues that surface in the sprint and remind the team of best practice, techniques and strategies to change the behavior that led to it. This is identifying and surfacing the root cause of issues or wins and then guiding the team on how to adapt to the feedback as soon as possible. Surfacing issues or having the team discuss things is absolutely valuable. But what is more efficient is to quicking expose the root cause and offer solutions.
About the Author: John McBreen is the founder of Work-Agile.net and a practicing Lean/Agile performance coach.
Work-Agile can remotely moderate your team’s retrospectives! We can help you run them more efficiently and achieving maximum results through senior level coaching. Please contact us today to find out how we can help your team.
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