The Agile Wilderness: Principle #12: Reflect and Adjust

Agile Principle #12: "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." (1)

Image from medium.com (2)

Digging into the agile principle

The first part of the principle brings in the concept of a cadence or regular interval where we take time to reflect as a team. This is mostly thought of as a sprint within scrum however does not have to be. For example, if a team is using Kanban, they can choose to do a retrospective every week, month, or quarter.

There are tons of different formats to do retrospectives and actually entire books written about them such as "Agile Retrospectives: making good teams great" by Ester Derby and Diana Larsen (3). It is important to mix up the format of your retro to keep it fresh and make sure we are finding things to continue to improve within the team. You can start with a simple retro of what went well and what could have gone better but I find as you get into the more fun retrospective formats. Some of my favorite examples of these are shown below such as the 4L's, "rose, thorn, bud" or the sailboat retro.

A key to having a successful retrospective is the second part of this principle and that is that you actually take action and make adjustments from it. You should be committing to 1-2 things as a team that you are going to improve out of your retro and revisiting those team experiments at the start of your next retro to talk about how they are going. Assigning an owner to the experiment is important to make sure someone takes time making the adjustment and that as a team we are taking the time we need to make the changes we talked about.

I have also found it important that on top of doing a regular sprint retro, it is important to do a larger retrospective on a less frequent basis such as every quarter or after a major milestone for your team. I find these allow the team to take a further step back and see the bigger picture or as some say "see the forest through the trees". This also allows time to make larger changes to the team that you may not have felt possible doing within a shorter timeframe.

Comparing the agile principle to Scrum values and SAFe scaled principles

Scrum values (4) dig deeper into characteristics to have during a retrospective. As we reflect and adapt as a team it is important to have courage to talk about the hard things or things that did not go well so that we can improve as a team. We also need to make sure during these times of reflection we are respectful and open with each other as we discuss how we can improve. Without these elements within the retrospective the team will just focus on surface level items and make little to no improvement.

SAFe scaled principles #4 and #7 talk about the idea of reflecting and adapting directly. (5) Within scaled principle #4 "build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles" we see the idea of plan-do-check-adjust cycles at various levels within the organization. Within SAFe depending on the configuration, the team, program, and portfolio levels should be going through these cycles and making adjustments at each level along the way. Within scaled principle #7 "Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning" we see the idea of synchronizing the cadence so that we are doing retros within the teams at the same time and then do larger retros across say an agile release train (ART) at the end of the program increment (PI). To learn more about ARTs (6) and PIs (7), I would encourage you to look at the SAFe website.

Suggested changes to the original agile principle

I would recommend stronger wording at the end of the principle to clarify that action needs to be taken by the team to make changes and not just passive tuning.

"... then takes action to adapt its behaviors accordingly"

You see far too many teams having retrospectives and reflecting but never making the changes they talk about. It is important to identify owners and reflect on the actions we committed to in our last retrospective to make sure we are making the changes we discussed and helping our team continue to improve.

Closing

In closing, a large part of the agile mindset is regularly reflecting and improving as a team. Here is a quick summary of the comparisons and changes I would suggest for reference.

I hope you have enjoyed this article and as always feel free to reach out to discuss further or drop a comment below to join the discussion. Thank you for your time and look forward to sharing my thoughts about "Principle #8: sustainable dev" next time.

About the Author

Jeff Mortimer?(#theAgileMoose) is an Agile Enthusiast with over 10+ years of experience working in various roles on agile teams including business analyst, product owner, scrum master, team leader, technical delivery manager and now an agile coach consultant focused on product transformations. In additional to his certifications in CBAP, AAC, CSP-PO, SAFe Agilist and SAFe LPM, Jeff?has presented at several conferences throughout North America and joined the blogger universe a couple years ago to bring a voice to the everyday agile practitioners. He also just received his EMBA at Quantics School of Business and Technology. He is a husband to an amazing intelligent wife who has her doctorate in math education, father to kids who bring him joy every day, friend that brews beer and plays soccer, and citizen who helps organize volunteers to give back to the community.

Follow #theAgileMoose for the latest insights in the agile wilderness.

References

(1)?Agile Principles from agile alliance

(2) Principles Image from medium.com

(3) "Agile Retrospectives: making good teams great" by Ester Derby and Diana Larsen

(4)?Scrum Values ?from scrum.org

(5)?SAFe Scaled Principles ?from scaledagileframework.com

(6) ARTs within SAFe

(7) PIs within SAFe