Agile Retrospection Making Good Teams Great

Introduction

After reading Agile Retrospectives making good teams great it has triggered some intended and un-indented consequences. Often it is too easy to get caught up in the technical delivery that we fail to go back to basics. This book is an excellent reference point for anyone in the position of facilitating a retrospective or wanting to inspect and adapt on sprint, iteration or project. One of the simplest takeaways for me is to document the team values and working agreements that act as the social contracts that bind a team together defining the behaviour and interactions. For example, mobile phones are silent in meetings/not replying to Slack/Teams in ceremonies. These simple agreements can help mitigate conflict and are something that can be facilitated through a retrospective.

The same old activities lose their zest. If you're bored with the same activity, chances are your team is too.

There is only so much start, stop, and continue a team can take. More intentionally the book provides excellent examples for different use cases and activities to capture data, generate insight and decide what to do.

The remainder of this post will synthesise my own work looking at agile maturity with the key points from Esther Derby and Diana Larsen book.

For visual learners, there is a supporting Miro Board and in the future, I hope to experiment with some more short-form content.

Definitions

Let's start with some definitions. The Sprint Retrospective is held at the end of each Sprint after the Sprint Review (Przyby?ek et al. 2022) giving an opportunity to look back over the sprint and recognise what went well and what could be improved through action items. This could be related to people, the development process, engineering practices or potential efficiencies.

Principles

1. What went well, that if we don’t discuss, we might forget?
2. What did not work and how can we improve it?
3. What will we commit to improve in the next iteration?

Introduction from Making Good Teams Great

Helping Your Team Inspect and Adapt

1. Set the stage
2. Gather data
3. Generate insights
4. Decide what to do
5. Close the retrospective

A Retrospective Custom Fit To Your Team

Leading Retrospectives

Release and Project Retrospectives

Conclusions

Building on this book would suggest more tangible options for facilitation in the remote and hybrid world we live in. Miro for example can be an excellent tool to digitise and bring a dispersed team together to inspect and adapt digitally.

I plan on adapting Mad, Sad, Glad to capture data on a project retrospective, before recognising the patterns and shifts looking for the relationship between fact and feeling to generate the insight, then crucially deciding what to do using SMART goals. We will close using a retro of the retro to inspect and adapt the ceremony looking forward.

This definitely keeps a place on the desk for quick reference and I hope the Miro proves useful for others or inspires you to read the book as well.

Up next is Mike Cohn 's Succeeding with Agile.

Let me know.

References:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMCUPeSk=/?share_link_id=181741957671