Holding Two Retrospectives Each Sprint?
Not another meeting! Well, maybe more is better. Let’s see.
Each delivery team needs to hold its own, private retrospective. The purpose of this meeting is to be brutally honest, open and frank about reviewing ourselves, becoming a team rather than a collection of individuals and improving. It is up to the team if product owners, customers, managers and others are allowed to attend. A delivery team should be have the courage to ask the ScrumMaster to be absent without fear of losing respect. This is the way of Scrum.
On the other hand, many teams have gotten great benefit from having others invited into a retrospective. If that works for your team, great! Do it.
If you conduct a larger retrospective, I ask one more thing: ask yourself and the rest of the delivery team, privately, if anyone avoided a conversation in the retrospective. If this is true, another retrospective is in order. There are many legitimate reasons someone may hold back.
For example, someone might be participating in an agreement being made to improve the next sprint review. In the back of their mind, maybe they are thinking, “I have an issue with attending the next sprint review. I would rather coordinate without distracting the customer and product owner because it is probably not the right time or place.” If just the team were present, the same person would often share this immediately. There are, of course, many more personal cases that can be sequestered in a person’s psyche.
Another example. At a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company, we had several scrum teams. As part of preparing for the sprint review, each team would hold its own retrospective. Many people flew in for the sprint planning meeting, so it was a big, multi-team event. Each team would do a demo, review the progress and events in the sprint, and report on the processed information from the team retrospective. At the conclusion of the demos and reviews, we would conduct a quick retrospective with all teams and attendees. The two retrospectives contained different information and context, so each served a different purpose. Both kinds added value in their own ways.
One way to have a customer retrospective is to hold a “black-hat session,” a technique I learned from Leah Buhey. These are great for getting really good feedback. Black-hat sessions are used at Adaptive Path, the marketing and user-experience firm that coined terms like “Ajax” and “blog.”
Here’s the format for a black-hat session:
- Pretend there are things you don’t like
- Pretend you aren’t supportive of this product
- Pretend you’ve never seen it before
- Pretend you only have five seconds
Poke as many holes in the product as you can, then process and discuss using an appropriate debriefing strategy. This way, the information is processed into a healthy state rather than leaving unprocessed information that will inevitably fester and become painful to someone.
So, if your retrospectives don’t get the juicy, “really meaty” stuff out and into a tangible, prioritized list of the top actions for self-improvement or if a team seems to have its own “elephant in the room,” maybe it’s time to take a closer look at a retrospective…or two.
Tags: Agile, retrospectives, Scrum, teamwork