Spicing Up Your Sprint Retrospective
Techniques to keep your team engaged
We all know that workouts keep us healthy, so we make time to do our walks, runs or hit the gym. But if you were to run the same route or repeat the same set of workouts over and over, you will soon get bored and fail to find new ways to challenge yourself.
Similarly for your sprint retrospectives, you know it is an important scrum event that allows the Scrum Team to inspect for areas of improvement and adapt their ways of working to make future sprints better. New ideas and approaches need to be incorporated to make the most of them, to help your team to gain important insights and improve its agility.
How do you know that your retrospective is getting stale?
Signs that your retrospectives are losing its purpose
Before we dive into some techniques to could help to spice up your retrospectives, let’s take a brief look at the common signs that your technique has lost its shine.
“We don’t talk anymore… Like we used to do…”
One tell-tale sign that your team is less engaged is there are fewer topics being brought up for discussion. Most of the time during the retrospective is so quiet that you can hear the pin drop.
Even if there are topics raised, the discussion is shallow and lack of depth. Only that few team members participated and the rest are just listeners. You also start to call names to get inputs and have some discussions going.
Low attendance from the Scrum Team
The other huge indication is you observed that attendance is started to fall off. More of your team members prioritise other meetings over the retrospective. You also start to reschedule or cancel the retrospective due to low attendance.
Retrospective ideas to keep your team engaged
More than 90% of employees confessed that they have daydreamed during meetings. This metric could be higher with a lot of us working remotely these days.
We would like to engage our team in meaningful conversation instead of yet another retrospective. So it’s time to make the change.
You are now hyped up and ready to rock and roll, but you aren’t sure where to start. With the help of some researches and experience past and present, I have summarised some of my favourite techniques for you to mix and match.
Note: All techniques are not tool specific. You can use just sticky notes and sharpies or digital tools available in the market.
Start, stop, continue
This is by far the most common method that scrum teams use. This technique is “task-oriented” and focuses the team on what they need to do, fairly a hit if you are part of a pragmatic team.
Spend around 10 minutes for observations and 10–15 minutes on each column to talk about the team’s feedback. For the actions identified, have the owners and due dates agreed by the end of the session.
Another extremely common technique is the What went well? What needs to improve method. I’ll not be going through this technique since I’m relatively sure most of us are familiar with it.
Mad, sad, glad
Your emotions is more powerful than you can imagine. It affects your mood and productivity at work. This technique asks your team to inspect what affects them and how this can be addressed in the future.
Everyone is asked to write down the feedback about the last sprint and place them in the appropriate column of the retro board according to what made them feel mad, sad, or glad.
Liked, lacked, learned, longed for
What did you like about the previous sprint? What did you lacked or longed for? Most importantly, what did you learned? Briefly explain the meaning of the 4 Ls. Allow your team time to think and provide their observations, before placing them in the appropriate sections.
Once completed, invite your team members to elaborate their observations in 1–2 sentences. Identify areas that the team has agreed to address in the next sprint.
Events on the timeline
Spend around 10–15 minutes on this at the beginning of your retrospective to refresh memories and set the stage for the rest of the session. On the board, draw a horizontal line to represent the timeline of the past sprint. Invite your team members to mark wins, failures, changes to team… anything and everything that was significant in that sprint.
Why, why, why, why, why
There could be a sprint when you experience something painful that you’d like to avoid in future sprints. Start the discussion by asking why such incident occurred. Once the team has agreed on the reason, ask the team why that was the reason. Repeat asking “why” for a few times, and you would realise the root cause and potential solutions will surface. This technique is common in performing root cause analysis.
Thank you and giving compliments
Retrospectives are not all about finding areas for improvements. When everyone is busy with getting things done, it’s easy to let positive compliments fall through the cracks. Don’t let that happen! Put aside the last 5 minutes for your team to give kudos and compliments when someone did something awesome. This would have your retrospective ends with a positive note!
Final note…
The above techniques are not silver bullets especially if there are underlying issues troubling your team. However, they will at least allow the team to check-in internally and assess how well / badly they do for the sprint.
Regardless which of the above technique you would like try out, you may feel uncertain if your team likes it. What’s more direct other than asking them?
When you wrap up the retrospective, spend some time to ask them how do they feel about the new format. Ask questions such as “Would you like to keep this format for the next sprint?” or “Can we refine the format to better work for the team?” These valuable feedback will allow you to adjust your next retrospective.
It’s important to keep in mind there are endless ways to make retrospective fun. Hold it outdoors once in a while, or over drinks on a Friday afternoon. You can also invite people from other teams if they were involved in the work you’ll be reflecting on.
As facilitators / Scrum Masters, we should keep experimenting, keep learning, and keep improving with our team. Happy experimenting!
