5 Steps for your next Agile Retrospective meeting

Retrospectives - Done wrong, they feel like a massive waste of time along with confusing everyone about the purpose of the activity. If done well, they provide you with answers to complex business challenges that you never knew existed.

Having delivered over 50+ agile projects, and a few digital products across both commercial and impact environments, I have had my share of good and bad project runs. But I have always observed that consistent, well curated retrospectives have allowed me and my teams to perform better the next time.

So, when hindsight is 20/20, why would you not leverage it to elevate your game?

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What are retrospectives?

Retrospectives help teams learn from the past and identify improvement opportunities. Much like a post-game interview, only longer and more detailed. A process which allows a team to look back at the project run and glean insights about how to do further collaborative projects much better.

While there are many tools and guides on exactly how to go about organizing the retrospective (I especially love this one by Atlassian), I have realized that there is rarely a quick guide for scrum masters on the overall life-cycle of a retrospective.

1. Setting Expectations

As the scrum/project manager for the said project, its your responsibility to ensure that everyone sitting at the retrospective is adding maximum value to the discussion. To do that, you need to put on your facilitator hat and enable everyone to that end.

The PMI (Project Management Institute) recommends that project managers should spend about 90% of their efforts in enabling team communication.

Your efforts to set expectations for a successful retrospective is to ensure the following pre-conditions.

• Alignment and Goal Clarity: Everyone at the table is clear about the goal of the project and where the project landed vis-a-vis the goal and targets.

• Comfort and Camaraderie: People should be comfortable verbalising things contextually, without fear of being judged. Critical, as without that you risk losing out on valuable insights. 

• Integrity and Accountability: Team members are aligned to the objective of the retrospective: That its not a 'Whose fault is it anyway', but rather a meaningful discussion about 'How can we do better?'

2. Establishing a retrospective framework

The last thing you want is a bunch of people sitting around a table talking about random aspects or times in the project. Its inefficient and vague. Sharpen your retrospective, by having a robust structure that you are comfortable with.

You can go meta, and have the Start, Stop and Continue model to talk about team practices. You can be specific and bring up your targets and indicators and evaluate their performance. You can go the timeline way and examine milestones' performance and correlate it with your results. You can augment it all with stakeholder/participant feedback. 

Not only does it help the retrospective go better, but it also helps you as a project manager know what kind of answers you want from the process, thereby helping you prioritize first things first. 

3. Evolve Systems & Processes

Your retrospective is not done after the retrospective meeting. Its done only after you have incorporated all of those insights, process changes and strategic recommendations into your project documents. If not done, you risk losing all of this work and effort you put in to the review.

Credit: VSkills

Evolve those documents, processes & systems. So that the next time you pick it up, its ready for you to be deployed as is, rather than you having to now sit and sort through some retrospective document you had made years ago and have promptly forgotten all nuances and details. 

A good way to positively incentivize yourself to do it, is to schedule a learnings showcase right after the retrospective so that you have some external accountability in your company. Or, sit and blog about it like yours truly.

4. Celebrate

Pavlovian conditioning for the win! Program yourself and your team to anticipate retrospectives. Your team has worked hard. You have worked hard. You took it the extra mile and finished your retrospective AND documented your learnings. You deserve that beer!

Plus, its an amazingly timed bonding activity. Teams that celebrate together, stay together. This will feed into the next time you work on your project together thereby already setting the tone of camaraderie and comfort for you all. Resulting in better teams, better communication and a better project run! 

"Culture eats Strategy for breakfast" - Peter Drucker

Cultural Integration

Eventually, your goal is to get your team to have a rhythm of retrospective to normalize an org behaviour of review and retrospective. Could be once a month or once a quarter. Would recommend this frequency as anything beyond this would lead to retrospectives losing their value.

Stat about culture change as the best way to incorporate new behaviour. Stat about culture change being a key predictor of org success.

Once this starts to get ingrained in the org culture, you will start to see teams running micro-retrospectives on their own and that, my friends, is what self-learning teams look like!

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BONUS!!

You can check out a free to use retrospective template from my archives of delivering global consulting assignments to solve growth problems at companies spanning sectors like contingent staffing, non-profits, startups, logistics, governance.

This system allowed me to execute, and learn from many reviews and retrospectives in the smoothest of ways that allowed unparalleled insights and incredible learnings that helped my teams perform well. Feel free to use it and do share your experiences with me on Twitter @Slim_Snail!