Retrospectives and why you should be doing them

Retrospectives and why you should be doing them

I will put my hands up and admit that I was one of those people who at one point saw a team retrospective as a fun session where everyone sang each others praises, some issues were raised and dealt with which helped the team make some headway towards improved ways of working and increased performance. 

Whilst good things were coming out of the sessions, it almost felt like "something" was missing. It wasn't until I really started to dig down into the vast amount of information available on retrospectives until I really started to see the value. I took some time to refocus, reassess and really started to understand why everything I was reading was singing the "retrospective" praises.

A key indicator of a teams success is their ability to continuously learn and improve, to overcome challenges and strive for a better tomorrow. The key tool in your tool kit (which is often extremely undervalued) is a team retrospective. 

All of my research got me thinking, to keep retros exciting, I think its important to vary the focus of your retro, try different things and keep it fun. Below are a few of  the ideas that I have either tried or have crossed my mind recently and I thought I'd share them: 

Consider the long term

A lot of retrospectives focus on reviewing your past performance, the aim of the below two ideas is to help teams focus on the more holistic view. 

1. Now vs this time next year
This idea puts a slight spin on typical retro themes and really helps you think about "What journey are we on?", "Where do we want to be" and "What are we trying to achieve". Whilst potentially useful for any team, I think these may be extremely valuable for those teams that don't currently have a long term vision.

The focus is on:

"Where are we now?"
Team members can write good/bad feedback about the current ways of working.

and "Where do we want to be a year from now?"
I would encourage people to be ambitious. What could we achieve if set this as our biggest focus area for the next year?

If you are anything like my team, you will end up with a long list of great suggestions (making it really hard to cast votes). These important items may well help you set out a vision for your team for the next year. In terms of retro actions are involved, take your highest voted item, if this comes from the "Next Year" column, create some action points which you can realistically achieve between now and your next retro which drive you towards what you team clearly see as your most important goal.

2. If a year from now this product was a complete failure, what would have contributed to the failure?

An interesting topic which may help the team highlight the core problems with internal team processes and processes and pressures from outside of the team that effect team performance. Although in some way it is not different to the previous idea, having the spin on the focus may help generate different thoughts/ideas

Feel like you are not getting enough value out of your retros?

Do a retro on how to make retros more valuable
It may be a good idea to suggest that team members go away and spend some time to reiterate the value of a retrospective, and what you really are trying to achieve before running this type of retro. Once everyone has built up the base knowledge/ reminded themselves of the value, come to together to discuss how you can improve. What are you doing well? What could you do better?

Understanding how you can do retros better may be the key piece of the missing puzzle for accelerating your team improvement (and it may be as simple as not setting SMART action points or not digging deep enough into finding out the route cause of the problem up for discussion).

Too busy to do retros?

We've all been there, an important product milestone/deadline in looming, everyone is so focused on delivery that you skip a retro. You may continue on to skip next retro, and the next. You eventually lose sight the value in retros, its been 6 months and you forget they even exist. 

Being in a busy team for a prolonged period of time can often lead to burn out, frustration, demotivated team members and it almost seems to feel like there actually is an I in team ;) Look out for those that you work with, suggest a team retro. You will probably find that by understanding and analysing your processes / team constraints there are several things that are within your control that you can do to help your team move from 0 to hero. 

If external pressures really are the reason for your excessive workload, think of ways you can skill up the team in order to be able to better cope with it next time.

I'd love to hear your ideas/suggestions. If anyone does try out any of the ideas listed in this blog, please get in touch and let me know your feedback. I'd love to hear how they worked for your team.