Effective Retrospectives – How to Get More Out Of Your Retrospectives

How do you get the most of your retrospective so your team implements the improvements, and the keys to effective facilitation
Different types of retrospectives – different techniques to keep people engaged
Facilitation techniques
- Silent writing
- Dot voting
- Make the improvement goal visible – add to Sprint Backlog?
Team Building and Appreciations

Why do we want Continuous Improvement? To reach higher performance
One change at a time
Determine how you will track it
Applying the techniques that create the metrics for tracking your success
- Identify improvement opportunities
- Vote to determine which one to focus on
- Determine how you will track the improvement
- Track the improvement
- Revisit the improvement item at the end of the Sprint in the next Retrospective to see how you did and if you got the desired result
- Continue doing that positive thing and look for the next area for improvement
STORY: Chicago team – tracking defects – track improvements – code reviews
Mike Cohn – Higher performance = continuous improvement – interviewed at the Agile Heroes Summit

Enhance team collaboration, and boost morale
- “Morale is a Multiplier for Velocity” – Joe Justice
Review Recurring Roadblocks
- Frequency – how often do they come up
- Quantity – how many are recurring
- How long have they been an issue
- How many other Scrum teams in your organization have the same challenges
Organizational Impediments
- ScrumMaster Community of Practice
- Scrum of Scrums – Escalate Roadblocks each day
- STORY: Scrum in Jets example – Scrum of Scrums escalation
- Release Retrospectives
ScrumMaster Checklist – Organization Impediment Form:
- https://scrummasterchecklist.org/pdf/ScrumMaster_Checklist_12_unbranded.pdf