Facilitating Effective Retrospectives: Capturing Lessons and Actually Learning From Them
By: J Edwards
Tags: Scrum, Project Management, Retrospectives, Lessons Learned, Agile

Benefits of Holding a Retrospective

Retrospectives are an essential part of doing Agile “right”. Teams that conduct structured Retrospectives are typically more effective than those that do not.

Why are Retrospectives good for your team?

Uncover Issues

Unmet objectives, incomplete tasks, and missed deadlines can be the result of a number of small setbacks. Unfulfilled goals left at the end of a Sprint can put stress on your team and hinder performance.

We all know the familiar feeling — you start to work on something but don’t finish it. Thoughts of the unfinished work continue to pop into your mind, even when you’ve moved on to other things — taunting you with the work you have yet to complete. This is known as the Zeigarnik Effect — the propensity for an individual to remember interrupted tasks better than completed work. The Zeigarnik effect highlights the stress, anxiety, and strained relationships that can result when tasks and issues are left incomplete.

Unfulfilled goals in a project raise questions about team performance, bring project challenges to the forefront, and indicate that changes need to be made. The change can be one that is easily integrated into your processes or one that sparks a massive rehaul of operations. Either way, it’s imperative that the root cause is identified.

A deep dive into issues that arise is an essential part of understanding performance impediments and limitations; issues can fester and run wild if left unaddressed. Retrospectives provide an opportunity to sort through uncertainties in complex environments to improve team processes and dynamics.

Create Action Items

The lessons learned from participating in a Retrospective can help with the development of plans, improvement of processes, or result in a list of considerations for Sprint Planning. Regardless of how you choose to integrate the lessons learned from a Sprint into future use, you should have actionable items outlined to ensure future benefit. Sharing knowledge and leveraging refined insight is important; action items provide a record of what has been learned from each Sprint experience.

Your team can promote continuous improvement and achieve accelerated learning by using shared experiences to reduce the learning curve. Failure to incorporate a clearly defined reflection point can put your team at a disadvantage — team members carry on with bad habits, continue to run into the same obstacles, and are unable to improve moving forward. Retrospectives can help your team identify opportunities for improvement, experiment with new approaches, and uncover approaches to clearing obstacles.

Use an action-focused approach for your Sprint Retrospectives to ensure that your discussions generate change rather than just being a forum for your team to air grievances. Checklists can provide an excellent way to prioritize your action items and motivate you to get more done.

Develop an Open Culture

Retrospectives provide a forum for team members to learn from themselves and from each other. When performed properly a Sprint Retrospective promotes a culture of learning, openness, and honesty. To build trust, team members need to be honest and transparent. No one should feel like they will be ostracized or punished for admitting there is a problem. Discussions should focus on analyzing what went wrong instead of who caused it to happen; it is not a finger-pointing exercise but should encourage self-identification and areas for improvement from everyone on the team.