Beyond Retrospective - Knock the socks off your team!!

You’re a new Scrum Master looking out for ways to spice up your retrospectives, sense the pulse of your team or gather ideas around one focus area. Well, there are several sites out there suggesting different techniques to run your retrospectives. You can browse through different techniques, choose the ones which will suit your purpose, tweak it a bit to make it more align with your goal and execute the same with your team.

All Set?? Trust me, it’s not. Retrospective is just over for you, it’s not ended yet.

You just finished an awesome retrospective with your team, lots of good insights got uncovered and team listed out a bunch of action items which will lead to real change, and real change only happens as a result of a committed and steady effort.

Cakewalk?? Not really!! The real challenge for a scrum master begins now. Following-up on your retrospective action plan is the hardest part. It’s often challenging to keep a team motivated and focused on getting agreed upon action items done.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. During my interactions with fellow Agilists in a meet up or conference and even with my colleagues, I keep on getting questions around the best ways to follow up on retrospectives, and I believe this is because people feel frustrated when there is a consistent lack of follow-through on retrospective action items.

Few of the techniques we usually try out are:

·        Add couple of prioritized retrospective action items in the sprint backlog (JIRA/any tool)

·        Get the status of retrospective action items during Daily Scrum (daily stand up)

·        Create a separate Kanban board to track retrospective points, either in an electronic tool (JIRA, etc.) or whiteboard.

The idea is to make sure that team is aligned and agreed on next steps, action items were assigned with deadlines. I tried this and I feel that it’s not enough.

After all, once we’re out of retrospective, things come up. Circumstances change. Priorities shift. Team members are working more hours than they want to work, tackling a production issue, making presentation for a visiting partner, attending hackathons, going for a full day training session, etc. And in many teams, it’s generally accepted that people won’t do everything they’ve agreed to in a meeting. People give lame excuses for not completing action items. I keep on hearing, “I had too many meetings in the evening” and “Something else came up.” It’s hard to oppose against this kind of culture but it’s possible. There’s an opportunity for coaching. But, that’s not the intention of this article, I will park it for later.

The challenge here is to verify that people are completing their action items on time without coming across like a drill instructor or an interrogator. I have a three steps simple technique to help you follow up on action items more effectively, and without alienating those whose support you need. These steps are simple, but that doesn't mean they are not effective. Sometimes the most effective things are also the easiest to implement!

Step 01: Guess Success

Throw a question to team after retrospective gets over. Ask them the probability of action items getting implemented. Draw a scale on a flipchart, whiteboard or mural board, labeled 'Probability we'll implement our action items'. Mark '0%' on the left and '100%' on the right. Ask everyone draw an emoticon of their current mood on a sticky note and place their sticky according to their confidence in their follow through as a team. Have a discussion around interesting results such as low probability or bad mood. It will generate a sense of accountability & ownership around the action items.

Step 02: Choose your Ambassador

Action items are for the team. It’s a responsibility of a Scrum Master to make sure that action items are addressed and executed. But without the help of the team members it’s not possible. Scrum Master may not be always around, so it's important for a team to step and take up the responsibility. That's where the Ambassador technique comes in handy. As part of this technique, team name one person as the Ambassador, and he or she is responsible for reminding the rest of the team about its agreements. Team would nominate someone to be a ‘Topic Ambassador' for each item on its action plan. This person is responsible for ‘owning’ his or her action item and must ensure the team does everything it can to follow through on it during the upcoming iteration. This is an excellent technique for catalyzing real change following your retrospectives.

Steps 03: Note to Self

Ask everyone to write a reminder for her- or himself about a change in their own behavior (aligned to the retrospective action items) they want to try during the next iteration. It's for quiet self-reflection and is not shared with the group. But if someone wants to share, do let them share. Ask them to take their respective sticky notes with them to their desktop and put it in a place they will look at often. Writing a note and then reading a note later is a powerful way to remind & then reflect upon something. It helps you foster your thoughts & reflections.

 I hope these three steps will give you plenty of ideas to help your follow-up on your agile retrospective action plans. You can use all three together or mix and match as per your need. Getting to a higher level of completion on action items leads not only to exponential progress toward goals, but also to a tremendous sense of accomplishment — both personally and for the team.