Facilitation

5 Tips for Facilitating Productive Team Retrospectives

Excellent retro facilitation comes down to five key factors: the right people, getting them talking, avoiding groupthink, actionable takeaways and the tools that make this process simple.

Data

3 Metrics You Should Review at Every Retrospective

Three critical data points to review during every retrospective will anchor your decisions to change the system in stats, not opinion. Transforming your subjective retro into an efficient, smart meeting based on facts, figures, and quantifiable improvements.

Participation

How to Use the Improvement Rating to Make the Most of Your Retrospectives

Tracking your Improvement Rating in ScatterSpoke can go a long way to maintaining a data-driven, quantitative approach to how well you’re using your time together to improve how you deliver value.

Scaled

Why Scaling Retros Is the Next Step in Your Agile Transformation

Organizational level retros facilitate collective ownership of the company’s performance. They allow people from all levels of the organization to understand their impact on the system and identify ways for improving them.

Retro Format

Yet Another R.E.T.R.O Format

More often than not retros feel empty, if not forced. Folks just adding cards because they feel they have to have something good to say. I chose this to encourage groups to think and decide what needs focused attention to amplify.

Culture

Bringing Focus to Individuals & Interactions While Responding to Tremendous Change

Our agile practices of inspecting and adapting to constantly changing environments has prepared us to be flexible and to experiment. Our Scrum Values have taught us how to be open and courageous. We need to incorporate these values and practices into our everyday lives now, more than ever.

Culture

Making meaning of cultural values and preferences through retrospectives

Failing to recognize the diverse values and cultural preferences of colleagues usually lead to harmful assumptions that a difference in behavior is the result of a personal flaw, instead of recognizing it as a difference in social-emotional skills or cultural values.

Conflict

Coaching Through Conflict

The tricky side of conflict is that you don't want to eliminate it all together. As long as it is healthy, conflict within a team is actually a sign of life.

Scaled

Running Scaled Retrospectives

A scaled retrospective provides the chance to expand scope of improvements beyond the individual team.

Data

The Importance of Retrospective Rigor for Agile Marketers

Marketers are already in too many meetings; why should they keep up with some ridiculous Agile thing that just takes up space on their calendar?

Engagement

Break the Ice of Your Retrospectives

When an agile team gets frustrated with the situation where nothing ever changes, it is easy to say that the retrospective became useless.

Antipatterns

Stop Wasting Time in Retrospectives

We need to talk about what to change to fix the big problems. These are not short conversations. This should be the priority of our time together as a team.

Retro Format

The “Theory of Everything” Retrospective

They are usually systemic and environmental. Often things that exist in this quadrant impact the other three. It’s critical to address this quadrant because by improving items here, you can see huge improvements everywhere else!

Engagement

Retrospect on Your Retrospectives to Keep Them Fresh

If you think retrospectives have lost their shine, why not run a retrospective on your retrospectives? Look back at the good ones, and the less inspiring ones, what might you not have tried yet?

Remote

Three Rules for Remote Retrospectives

To me, it felt that despite all the communication they had daily they weren't talking about the right things. I presented some potential issues but suggested we ask what everyone else thinks. The response was epic.

Retro Format

Seeing the System With the WADE Matrix

This retrospective design makes it simple to facilitate, enjoyable for participants, and opens people's eyes to the cause-effect relationship of the bigger system (beyond the team).

Hypothesis

548 Days to Fix 1 Line of Code

How many retrospectives have you been in where improvement didn't happen? The team meets, writes stickies, forms action items, and not much changes.

Improvement

Agile Retrospective Antipatterns that Most Scrum Masters Never Realize

I would like to give to the group accountability. They should be the one deciding on this matter since they will be the one acting on it. The coach can ask them the question, "How will you solve this dilemma?"

Participation

5 Tools to Boost your Participation Rate

One of the challenges we face as facilitiators is keeping everyone engaged in the conversation. This is true of sprint planning, story pointing and of course in retrospectives. There can be a lot of underlying reasons that a team stays quiet- here's our top five ways to get them talking again.

Retro Format

Your Retrospective Format Doesn't Matter

Retrospectives are an incredible opportunity for our teams to learn, connect and grow. They don’t stop being productive because they get boring, they stop being productive because they lack actionable data.