A huge part of agile is the use of retrospectives where a team reflects back on the most recent sprint and considers improvements to how they work in the next or future sprints. There are a lot of great templates and formats that are available to use. It is a great deal more interesting and effective to mix it up and try different styles to keep the team(s) engaged and generating fresh ideas and leading to improvement actions.
Similar to a Kanban board a basic retrospective board will have a few columns such as in What went well, What to improve on, and Actions to take. In most cases you will want to conduct the retrospective as soon as possible after the sprint demo and before sprint planning. The retrospective should be facilitated by the Scrum Master for that sprint.
These should be done in person but can also be done well virtually using digital white boards of which there are many. Some options like Miro and Lucid have a number of retrospective templates using both basic formats as well as well baked variants that can help make things more interesting.
Ideally, the team is strong enough and supports psychological safety so that nobody holds back their opinions and observations so that and all voices are heard. How to run a basic retrospective:
| Retrospective Steps | Description |
|---|---|
| Review progress on previous retrospective improvement actions | In order to ensure progress, it helps to not only have team-based improvements on the board during the sprint but also to review them early in the retrospective. This could inspire additional related changes or maybe some of this improvement work drifts into the next sprint. |
| Harvest newly generated observations from most recent sprint | Teams typically take 5-10 minutes to capture observations on post-its and then place them on the board in the column that fits best the spirit of each observation. |
| Team vote on which observations to focus improvements on | Many ways to cast votes, but one popular way is to use dot votes where everyone is given 3 dots to vote with. |
| Select the top 2-3 and add them to the backlog for the next sprint | Based on the dot votes the top few observations should be clear. Add the top 2-3 to the backlog and assign to next sprint. This essentially carves out capacity before it is consumed by other work, but they could still get bumped to the next sprint. |
Agility Health Radar is an interesting platform that helps a great deal with capturing agile maturity for both teams and organizations. They offer a lot of resources that amplify continuous improvement efforts through a super charged retro process that takes this to a whole new level. Agility Health Radar recommends a quarterly cadence that is powerful to drive sustained improvement.
This is more inclusive than the typical agile team retro as it helps to identify problems with culture and other elements that may be causing friction that leadership needs to address. These do result in leadership actions being recommended as part of a formal executive debrief after all teams have participated.
There are a lot of interesting options for retrospectives many of which target specific areas to improve on. A really good scrum master will weave in a healthy variety of retrospective variants in order to keep things interesting and the team engaged.
Collaboration tools like Miro have several retrospective templates you can use. Management 3.0 has a good alternative with their Celebration Grid.
Some additional information:
- Agile Retrospectives, Second Edition: A Practical Guide for Catalyzing Team Learning and Improvement: Derby, Esther, Larsen, Diana, Horowitz, David: 9798888650370: Amazon.com: Books
- Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great: Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, Ken Schwaber: 9780977616640: Amazon.com: Books
- EasyRetro former FunRetro | Improve your team with fun sprint retrospectives
- Enterprise agility team management and continuous improvement (agilityhealthradar.com)
- Agility Health Radar
- Management 3.0 Celebration Grids
- Miroverse retrospective templates
Retrospectives are an important aspect of Business Agility and core to success with agile. Through regular retrospection teams can own and drive incremental improvements in how they work. Continual improvement, even in small increments has a snowball effect that increases over time while having an immediate impact.
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