This is a very simple and effective retrospective activity to increase team's #productivity and #performance to be used in the second step "gather data" of a 5 step retrospective as described in the best seller and must read Agile retrospective book.
The goal of retrospective activity: Improve the performance of the team towards producing high value with low effort.
The team should reflect on what they are doing regularly and what is the value and effort of each. Therefore, they should put sticky notes in 4 quadrants:
- High Value / Low effort: Things that should be preserved. They are highly valuable and optimized.
- High Value / High effort: Things that seem to be important but are taking a lot of work. Should be good to see how to make them simpler, if there are wastes, dependencies or unnecessary steps in the process or if the value worth its effort. Slice items into smaller pieces of value and identify which parts require more or less effort. Is there something that can be postponed?
- Low Value / Low effort: Things that have little value and are easy to do. Are they useless? Can they provide more value than that? Does the low effort worth its low value? Should we postpone, stop, or do less of these things?
- Low Value / High effort: Things that are taking a lot of work and are not important. The team should probably stop doing these. it would be interesting to think as slicing a story: Does the topic contains a fraction of good value that can be done with little effort?
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Prerequisites: A set the stage activity is finished.
- Introduction: Facilitator explains the activity
- Reflect and write: Team members write sticky notes individually or in groups of 2 or 3. They keep the notes off the board until everybody is done with writing.
- Note on the quadrants: When everybody is done with writing, one by one (not all together) they go to the board, put the sticky notes in each quadrant, and read them without explaining.
- Questions: Team members read the notes and ask if something is not clear. The writers explain the meaning of briefly avoiding debates, discussions, or solutions during this step.
- Group and voting: finally, the facilitator might want to group similar notes and vote what are the most important items to discuss in the next step.
Next steps: Use the most important items of this activity as an input for some activity to generate insights. Decide what to do and close the retrospective.
This is just one tool that can help your team to improve performance.
- How do you help your teams to improve performance and deliver more value?
- Which other techniques can you suggest?
