They’re usually facilitated by a Scrum Master and include only the team (not managers or other stakeholders, since their presence can deter teams from bringing up mistakes). On the other hand, discussing what didn’t work requires more tact and diplomacy. Ensure that everyone has a chance to express their thoughts without any judgment or defensiveness.
This is a good activity to help you understand the things in the previous sprint that made your team mad, sad, or glad. Group similar observations, and discuss and vote on which observations have the most impact. You can also try to add games or other fun activities to liven up the room and get your team more excited about participating in another retrospective meeting. Make sure to include a warm up or ice breaker, and end with positive reinforcement! Also make sure to follow up on the answers given and encourage discussion. This will help ensure everyone is engaged and involved, even those who may be less vocal.
Offer Multiple Ways to Share Information
We did not achieve perfection by the end of our year-long experiment. But we did refine our process to the point that we had gotten beyond simply meeting our key performance indicators. This also marked six months of working together as a stable core team. We’d had time to learn how each other works and to support each other better. We were able to move both of the issues identified as “not working well” in project B to the “worked well” column in project C. We often have much longer discussions about what didn’t work so well for our projects.
- The objective of holding a retrospective is to help the team discover ways to improve incrementally.
- Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.
- Document every retrospective and the outcomes your team agreed on.
- This empowerment supports ownership, initiative, and higher quality.
Retrospectives and reflections do not have to be time-consuming. I’ll show you a few approaches that you and your team can immediately incorporate into your practice. Do not share any data that is related to a specific person or that ranks individual performance.
Planning A Retrospective
You should also thank everyone for their participation and feedback. More often than not, this part of the retrospective will be upbeat, as it’s an excellent opportunity to project retrospective reflect on the team’s accomplishments. It can also be helpful to encourage team members to take the action items they’re responsible for and turn them into concrete goals.
In this session, get input from the team on how the meetings could improve, as well as action steps to achieve those improvements. Another way to diagnose any issues is to join your team’s retrospective as an observer and assign someone else to facilitate. From this new perspective, see if any problems become evident to you. At the agency level, project retrospectives provide a big picture view of how your people, systems, and operations interact to deliver value for your clients.
You can use these to focus the conversation and to support any arguments made for or against certain issues in the project. From simple task management and project planning to complex resource and portfolio management, Smartsheet helps you improve collaboration and increase work velocity — empowering you to get more done. According to the Agile Alliance, project and iteration retrospectives started to become common around 2003. The publication of the seminal book Agile Retrospectives in 2006 codified retrospective practices.
You, your team members, and your managers must understand what this meeting is for, who will attend, and how it will work. There is no one “correct” way to run a project retrospective meeting. However, there are some critical ideas and areas you can focus on to improve your approach and make your next project retrospective meeting more effective.
Root cause analysis means you identify the source of a problem instead of its symptoms. The causes could be unrealistic financial planning or insufficient oversight of project expenses. You can run retros fully asynchronously with an online retrospective tool like Parabol.
Having team members offer solutions to past and potential blockers will save your team time and stress in the long run. Retrospective meetings are good team-building exercises as they allow us to share praise and feedback. Discussing success stories, giving feedback, and brainstorming solutions will boost team spirit and energy levels. Taking time to show appreciation for a job well done and praise one another is another way to bolster morale. If you are reviewing a project as a team, that means it took many people with unique experiences to get to that point. This step ensures everyone gets all the facts straight before they try to solve problems they may only partially understand.