Innovative Sprint Retrospective for Distributed Teams

No-one undermines the importance of a Sprint Retrospective especially in this Covid-19 pandemic situation where teams started to work remotely. This happened all of a sudden and overnight. As our teams become more dispersed, it becomes even harder to run one successfully. Scrum masters are usually used to perform sprint retrospectives in person with their team in a conference room, but the question is how to do it successfully when your team is distributed or working from home like the situation we’re in right now. 

LIEUWE VAN BRUG, founder of Lerni.io says “Historically, the whole team has met 
in a conference room for the exercise, but today’s prevalence of distributed 
teams requires new solutions.”

Besides other challenges, one of the major challenge is to engage each and every member of the team in the activity. Most of the teams are using video conferences on Zoom or Microsoft Teams to conduct these ceremonies but I think for most of the time team members are just passive users.

A few days back I came across an online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring and engage distributed teams together. Whether your teams are collocated, distributed, or fully remote, Miro provides an engaging, intuitive, in-person collaboration experience with multiple options for real-time or asynchronous teamwork on an online whiteboard. Miro offers a wide range of solutions for Brainstorming, Research & Design, Agile workflows, and a few others. In this article, I will discuss how I conducted a Sprint Retrospective using this tool. There are few retrospective templates available for free users. But you can also create your own custom template that suits your needs. I preferred to create a custom template based upon the guidelines available here.

Setting up the Retro Environment

The Sticky Board: Sticky board is the place where different sticky notes are available for the team to use. The team can directly use the sticky notes from the tools panel available in the left corner but I preferred to set it up for my team. I created different sections with the team member names and placed sticky notes of different colors for the ease of my team.

Retro Board: The team retro board consists of 4 sections.

-Enablers: What makes it easy for the team to achieve its goals?

-Blockers: What are the temporary distractions that have been causing problems lately?

-Likes: What you like during the sprint?

-Dislikes: What are the things you don’t like?

Team Health Metrics: It is very important to know about team health after each sprint. You can add anything in this related to your team's Emotional health, Technical Health, or anything you want to shed some light on. For your reference I have added Team happiness while working from home, TDD, Team Collaboration, Sprint goal accomplishment, Estimations, DOR, and DOD.

Action Steps: A section to note the action items for the upcoming sprint improvement after the discussion with the team.

Facilitation guide

1. Check-in with a welcoming note to generate energy in the room so that everyone feels relaxed and comfortable.
2. Explain all the sections and environment you have created for the team. It might be difficult for the new joiners so explain how they need to go along with the activity.
3. Ask every team member to pick the sticky notes placed under the sections with their names, write the comments they need to add and paste it on the Retro board. Tell them to paste the correct color sticky notes in the matching Retro board section.
4. Give them time to complete the activity.
5. After the Retro board is completed request the team to fill the Team Health Metrics. Explain the terminologies, if someone finds difficulty in understanding.
6. Discuss each sticky notes in Retro board and Health Metrics findings with the team.
7. Ask questions all the time while discussing the comments added on the retro board, even the obvious ones to facilitate the discussion like Is this right? What do you think about this?, Do you think the same? What’s the first next step? Is this how it should be?
8. Note the action items your team needs to work as an improvement for the next sprint.
9. Closing by appreciating the team member efforts.

The Activity was quite engaging and intuitive for the team. It is a real-time 
platform so each and every member of the team can pick his/her own sticky, write 
down his comments, and paste it on the board. The team enjoyed the whole activity. 
Try it with your distributed teams for the next Sprint Retrospective and I hope 
your team will like it for sure.