Say Yes to Remote Retrospective!

I have over 3 years working based on Agile frameworks, and most of the time with distributed teams. We have passed through many challenges, but one of the most critical has been getting the team involved in the retrospective meeting. So, How to facilitate a retrospective meeting with distributed teams successfully?

Well, I will answer it with the main 4 keys that work for me: 

(I will summarize for the purpose of this post).

1.  Gain the team openness: I start sharing the importance of Openness value with a session to spread the knowledge about Agile principles and values. The main objective of this session is to be sure that the team or teams understand Why those are important. For this, it helps to show a case study of a successful company that has implemented it.

On the other hand, as an Agile leader, you should show openness, you need to lead with the example and take advantage of any opportunity where the team members are being truly transparent to reinforce that behavior. It is a continuous work, and sometimes the team will fail because of a lack of openness, in both cases, the team will learn by the experience.

2.  Quantitative analysis: We as a team know the story behind the numbers. It is something I always repeat to teams, but at the same time, I explain them that metrics help us to identify when something is getting wrong, especially if we can analyze metrics like the trend, rates, etc. Use quantitative analysis also helps to see (objectively) the sprint results and then talk about it, as a result, some issues or action items are put over the table.

We as a team know the story behind the numbers

3.  Qualitative Analysis: To make a great qualitative analysis I don’t hesitate to try different ways. It is required to prepare the retrospective meeting in advance based on the sprint mood, progress or any situation the team is facing. I have prepared many retrospectives using images, online tools, open conversation, etc. You can find many examples online, that you can use, but it is necessary to update it based on your team mood and considering the remote scenery.

The picture of this article contains one of the exercises we did. In that opportunity, the team members were showing on the shared screen one by one, and they should answer some questions. It was a team building exercise where they could think as a team and also think about what strengths they could contribute to the team, so it made learning so much fun!

4.  Action Items: As an Agile Coach, Lead or Scrum Master it is important to be alert, and make many questions, especially when detecting a possible action item. The action item list should be summarized at the end of the meeting with the responsible person and commitment date. Please make the action items follow up during the following sprint.

To finish, don’t forget to start the retrospective sharing the ground rules, making emphasis on the framework values (in Scrum: Openness, Focus, Commitment, Courage, and Respect).

So, say yes to a remote retrospective! Go experiment, evaluate the results and improve, it makes you gain experience and do it better each time!