May book review: Agile Retrospectives

This month, we continue the theme of team self-reflection and retrospectives started last year with my review of "Project Retrospectives" by Norman Kerth.

Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
Agile Retrospectives. Making Good Teams Great.

This book is an excellent addition to Norman Kerth's guide to project retrospectives. Esther and Diana focus on iteration and release retrospectives which are short and frequent. As such, they provide feedback faster and allow the team to find and fix issues before it is too late for the project. Iteration retrospectives are repetitive, seemingly easier to organize and facilitate, and may not even require a formal facilitator.

However, like any other routine executed over and over again, they could sometimes get tiring and even boring. What steps could we take to keep the discussion flow fresh and the team engaged? How could we help the team members apply their creative and unconventional thinking?

Esther and Diana outlined a five-step approach to leading retrospectives. For each step, they offered practical advice and a set of activities and techniques to make retrospectives insightful and fun:

1. Set the Stage

2. Gather Data

3. Generate Insights

4. Decide What to Do

5. Close Retrospective

  • Checkin
  • Focus On / Focus Off
  • Explorer / Shopper / Vacationer / Prisoner
  • Working Agreements
  • Temperature Reading
  • Satisfaction Histogram
  • Timeline
  • Triple Nickels
  • Color Code Dots
  • Mad Sad Glad
  • Locate Strengths
  • Satisfaction Histogram
  • Team Radar
  • Like to Like
  • Brainstorming / Filtering
  • Force Field Analysis
  • Five Whys
  • Fishbone
  • Patterns and Shifts
  • Prioritize with Dots
  • Report Out and Synthesis
  • Identify Themes
  • Learning Matrix
  • Planning Game
  • SMART Goals
  • Circle of Questions
  • Short Subjects
  • Triple Nickels
  • Force Field Analysis
  • +/Delta
  • Appreciations
  • Temperature Reading
  • Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis
  • Return on Time Invested
  • Satisfaction Histogram
  • Team Radar
  • Learning Matrix
  • Short Subjects

Retrospectives equipped with these activities will become a powerful iterative improvement tool for your team.

Note that I think of iteration, release, and project retrospectives as iterative rather than continuous improvement tools. They will help your team reflect, learn, adapt, and get better together, eventually reaching the performing stage of  Bruce Tuckman's Team Development Model. Performing teams are recommended to implement a continuous improvement tool, such as A3.

Esther's and Diana's book is easy to read, concise, and well organized. If you are doing iterative development, it is likely to serve you as a reference guide for many iterations to come.

To take a closer look at this and other Esther Derby's books, click here. Happy reading!

April book review: Project Retrospectives

Welcome again. Thank you for reading my monthly column. Today, we will talk about a classical book on project retrospectives by Norman Kerth.

Norman L. Kerth
Project Retrospectives. A handbook for team reviews.

In my consulting practice, I see many teams working very hard, constantly in a rush trying to save the day, making the most out of every single minute they have... and never having enough time to stop and think about how they perform. Retrospectives provide a formal way for teams to get away from their daily grind and take some time to reflect on their performance, seek an opportunity to learn and get better.

In his book, Norman Kerth does an excellent job guiding readers on how to plan, prepare, and facilitate an effective retrospective on project performance. He describes a very thorough approach to how to prepare for a retrospective in a situation when you are an outsider and do not know the details and history behind the project. He spends quite a bit of time discussing how to make a retrospective safe for all participants and provides valuable methods for extracting related project data and capturing lessons learned.

Norman's approach to retrospectives is a bit heavier than mine. He advocates for 3-4-day preferably off-site residential sessions. I tend to like shorter more frequent meetings ranging anywhere from a couple of hours to a day. In order for shorter more frequent meetings to work, you will need to minimize your project cycle time down to 1-3 months. A retrospective on a 3-year monster will certainly require substantial time and effort.

Remember, the greatest teams are great because they self-reflect and continuously improve.

Happy reading!

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