Rob's Guide to Effective Retrospectives - Revision history

Robbowley at 09:44, 2 April 2024

2024-04-02T09:44:54Z

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 __NOTOC__
 ===Retrospective facilitation is a skill===
-The first three chapters of Derby and Larson's book [http://pragprog.com/book/dlret/agile-retrospectives Agile Retrospectives: Making good Teams Great] remain essential reading for how to effectively facilitate retrospectives.
+The first section of Derby and Larson's book [https://pragprog.com/titles/dlret2/agile-retrospectives-second-edition/ Agile Retrospectives: Making good Teams Great] remain essential reading for how to effectively facilitate retrospectives.
 Ensuring meetings are not being driven by whoever shouts the loudest or ending up as a long ineffectual debate takes thought and practice.

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 --Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
 ===Rotate the facilitator role===
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 Really easy to do if you have more than one team - '''ask for someone from another team to facilitate your retrospective''' and when it's their turn return the favour. This has the wonderful side-effect of being a great way to cross-pollinate ideas between teams.
 ===Start each retrospective by going through the actions from the previous one===

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 ===Rotate the facilitator role===
-It is common for it to be one person's job (e.g. Scrum Master, Team Lead) to facilitate/lead retrospectives. This can result in bias towards their point of view and prevent a team from feeling engaged and empowered to solve their own problems. Whilst it may be one person's job to make sure they happen, that doesn't (and shouldn't) mean they have to run every retrospective too.
+It's common for it to be one person's job (e.g. Scrum Master, Team Lead) to facilitate/lead retrospectives. This can result in bias towards their point of view and prevent a team from feeling engaged and empowered to solve their own problems. Whilst it may be one person's job to make sure they happen, that doesn't (and shouldn't) mean they have to run every retrospective too.
 Get everyone to take turns facilitating. Not only does this ensure no one feels retrospectives are being driven by one person's agenda, there are many other side benefits, including:

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 * Retrospectives are less likely to become dull or repetitive.
-Really easy to do if you have more than one team - '''ask for someone from another team to facilitate your retrospective''' and when it's their turn return the favour and has the wonderful side-effect of being a great way to cross-pollinate ideas between teams.
+Really easy to do if you have more than one team - '''ask for someone from another team to facilitate your retrospective''' and when it's their turn return the favour. This has the wonderful side-effect of being a great way to cross-pollinate ideas between teams.
 ===Achievable actions and owners for each action===

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 The purpose of the Prime Directive is to assure that a retrospective has the right culture to make it a positive and result oriented event. It makes a retrospective become an effective team gathering to learn and find solutions to improve the way of working:
-''''"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."''''
+'''''"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."'''''
 --Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

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 Once you have your achievable actions make sure someone is responsible for each and every one you choose to take away. This doesn't have to be the person who is going to do the work, just the person who is responsible for making sure it happens before the next retrospective.
-Track the actions as you would with the rest of the activity in your team in your favourite work tracking tool
+Track the actions as you would with the rest of the work in your team in your favourite work tracking tool
 ===Start each retrospective by going through the actions from the previous one===

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 Ensuring meetings are not being driven by whoever shouts the loudest or ending up as a long ineffectual debate takes thought and practice.
-Conversely - and something more common with the increase in remote working and online meetings - is highly transactional transactional retrospectives which are no more than [https://twitter.com/chrismdp/status/1493155571154833413?s=20&t=UagX05G8gwHBwSBrI1hdbA Improvement Theatre]:
+Conversely - and something more common with the increase in remote working and online meetings - is highly transactional retrospectives which are no more than [https://twitter.com/chrismdp/status/1493155571154833413?s=20&t=UagX05G8gwHBwSBrI1hdbA Improvement Theatre]:
 ''"Retrospectives should be where people truly critique the status quo.<br/>