When a team starts implementing Scrum they will soon discover the value and the challenge in retrospectives.
Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews says that “retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts.”
In other words, retrospectives create a safe place for reflections so that the valuable lessons can be appreciated, understood and applied to new opportunities for growth at hand.
The Retrospective Prime Directive says:
| Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. |
With these noble principles in mind, there should be no fear from any team member about the learning, discoveries and occasions for progress.
These 5 retrospective techniques may be useful for other teams who are looking for fun ways to reflect and learn and grow.
- Success Criteria – The Success Criteria activity helps clarifying intentions, target outcomes, and results for success criteria. It is a futurospective activity for identifying and framing intentions, target outcomes and success criteria.
- 360 degrees appreciation – The 360 degrees appreciation is a retrospective activity to foster open appreciation feedback within a team. It is especially useful to increase team moral and improve people relationship.
- Complex Pieces – Complex pieces is a great energizer to get people moving around while fostering a conversation about complex systems and interconnected pieces.
- Known Issues – The Known Issues activity is a focused retrospective activity for issues that are already known. It is very useful for situations where the team (1) either knows their issues and want to talk about the solutions, or (2) keep on running out of time to talk about repetitive issues that are not the top voted ones.
- Candy Love – Candy love is a great team building activity that gets the participants talking about their life beyond the work activities
by Rachel Perry
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