Kick off the retrospective meeting by explaining the purpose and any ground rules that the team should follow. Get the team warmed up and set the stage with a quick icebreaker and any necessary introductions. We also recommend having an impartial facilitator to help keep the retrospective on task, allow for better collaboration among the key stakeholders, and record insights.
You may not need to invite the entire team, just the main stakeholders involved the scope of the project or week sprint in question.
Next, invite everyone that should be involved in the retrospective. If you’re conducting a remote retrospective, be sure to agree on which video conferencing tool (like Zoom) the team will use to communicate effectively. Even if you’re meeting in-person a digital collaboration platform like Mural is your best friend. Now, with increasingly hybrid and remote working environments, it’s not always possible to be in the same room. Traditional, in-person retrospectives usually involve a whiteboard, some post-it notes, and some markers in a meeting room. How to run effective retrospective meetings 1. Async retrospectiveĪ great remote retrospective option for distributed teams, conduct a retrospective asynchronously and reduce the number of meetings a team has to sit through. Use this framework to identify things as positive, negative, or having potential with the metaphor of a rose, its thorns, and a rosebud. Use a stoplight as a metaphor to consider and define what your team should start, stop, and continue doing. Sailboat retrospectives use a sailboat voyage as a memorable metaphor for the journey of completing a project or initiative from start to finish. Sailboat retrospectiveĪssess how well a project has been executed and identify areas for improvement. Though most often used by agile teams following the Agile methodology, the project retrospective is also helpful for any team looking to reflect on project progress and encourage continuous improvement. Reflect on a completed project and looks for opportunities to improve the way they work together in the future.
There are many different types of retrospectives, but most of them make sure to touch on a few key points:Ī simple retrospective to understand what went well, what went poorly, what ideas the team has, and how to take action to make the next sprint or project better. Retrospectives are an essential part of continuous improvement and help teams to learn from their mistakes and make incremental improvements over time. The goal of sprint retrospective meetings is to identify areas of improvement and come up with action items to address them in future projects or iterations. Improve collaboration by fixing workflowsĭuring a retrospective meeting, the team members gather together to discuss and analyze the successes and failures of the project, the effectiveness of the team's communication and collaboration, and the overall process used to complete the work.Create a safe space for teams to voice feedback and raise concerns.Identify challenges or opportunities for improvement in real-time.Retrospectives have many benefits, including: The goal is to evaluate past performance to improve process efficiency, teamwork, workflows, interactions, and the team’s definition of done. Retrospectives (or ‘retros’) are held at the end of each project or sprint to reflect on what went well, what needs to improve, and what ideas may have potential. Retrospective meetings provide that structure. It’s essential to have an established framework for gathering and recording ideas, as well as a culture based on psychological safety, to ensure that your team feels comfortable giving honest feedback. I like the tool called Miro to collaborate in the retrospective, you can find in the link below a template to run the sailboat retrospective.When the projects and sprints are over, the work isn’t done. Once you have all the information in the board it is time to group the similar feedback and discuss the most important topics and do not forget to create an action plan for the next sprint to keep the People, Process and Product always improving. Reef: Next month we going to need help from the US team to complete the system test so we have to plan this dependency in advance. Sun: My colleague John helped me to build a new library to process messages faster.Īnchor: We had issues deploying to the server causing delays to update the system. Wind: The Product Owner was very attentive to the sizing of the user stories and that helped us to delivery value faster. That is a very good way to bring the team to discuss about People, Process and Product bringing up ideas, problems and a bit of planning ahead. Using this technique we can get the team feedback in various aspects such was "The wind" what as good in the sprint, "The anchor" what was bad in the spring, "The Sun" shout out for the team, positive vibes and "The Reef" risks ahead.