Actions to improve retrospectives

As
teams move further into a project and are required to do retrospectives regularity,
there can come a time when the quality of the retrospectives can begin to
decline as compliancy sets in. The usual questions of what went well and what
went wrong can start to grow boring and teams can lose sight of the goal of retrospectives.
A team might use a few other actives, but overtime just reuse those ones over
and over again as well. However ensuring that the team you are working on or
leading is invested in the project is very important and so there are a few
ways to keep their interest up.

                One of
the most important ways is to ensure that you are following the basic pattern
of retrospectives each time. This patter consists of setting the stage,
gathering data, generating insights, deciding what to do and the closing.

                The two
questions of what went right and wrong can often skip past two or more of the steps
in this basic pattern, namely setting the stage and then gathering data, and
jumps right to the generate insights portion.

                The
gathering data stage is especially important as this is the part where the
teams discuss what exactly occurred such as what went wrong, or what you plan
to do about a particular issue, or what you want to improve or focus more on.
You should be spending a majority of the time on this step as it allows the entire
team to be on the same page.

                When a
team is doing the same retrospectives over and over again, then they can become
numb to its effects. It just becomes something you have to do rather than
something that should be used to improve the project. Therefore it is important
that the types of retrospectives are changed frequently to keep the team
members interested. There are several locations that different strategies can
be found such as Retrospective Wiki. Expanding the different resources that you
are using can help to boost your own retrospectives.

                Often
times it is too easy to find issues with a project, be it delays, or bugs or
lack of resources. They can often stack up and a team can find themselves overwhelmed.
Normally with a retrospective a team might pick a handful of problems to focus
on, but as more issues arise, those issues might be forgotten or overlooked to
deal with new ones. This can impact moral as the same issues arise in each retrospective.

                One way
to deal with this is to only focus on a single improvement at a time. A smaller
batch of issues can make the problems go smoother. It is also important to make
sure that the goals of the team are specific, not something like, team will
create more unit tests (Scrum Teams). That is too vague and not going to help
advance the project.

                You can
take a page from SMART goals and ask What, Why, Who, When and How when making
the outcomes of the retrospective stronger and more effective.

Sources:

“6 Simple Actions
to Help Scrum Teams Improve.” Agile @ Adobe,
blogs.adobe.com/agile/2014/10/08/6-simple-actions-to-help-scrum-teams-improve/.

Image Source: https://intland.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/retrospective\_meetings-336x336.png