Supercharging your software delivery
The retrospective is a meeting that the team can use to review their current processes and discuss ways that they can change how they do things to improve the project velocity. This needs to be a workshop and not a meeting so needs to have a bit of energy to it. Therefore it’s best to not have it in the early afternoon and use of an energizer/ice breaker at the start is always a good idea.
The way that I have tended to run these is as follows:
- Read out the Prime Directive – ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’
- Energizer
- Split the team into pairs then give them post-its
and pens to write down things that they want to put into one of three
categories:
- Things to stop doing
- Things to keep doing
- Things to start doing
- They then take each of these and one member of the team comes up explains their post-it and puts it in the relevant column on the whiteboard. These should be grouped where there are common themes with post-its that have already been added.
- As a team agree which of the stop doing and start doing post-its the team should adopt and how they will be put into action.