Many problems are easier to solve when you have data. However, there is a difference between having data and using data. Several years ago, I worked wit an organization that was experiencing system outages. After months of outages and no effective action, they...
Recently, I attended two retrospectives. Different teams, different states, different facilitators. I’m usually on the other side, leading retrospectives. Both retrospectives followed the “make lists” pattern. One made two lists “What worked...
Slides from a talk I gave on Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives: Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives View more presentations from Esther Derby And take a look at PROMOTING DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING IN RETROSPECTIVES.
“The thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us where we need to be.” attributed to Albert Einstein I have this niggling concern about retrospectives. I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short,...
From time to time, I hear from people who aren’t realizing value from their retrospectives. When I probe to understand the situation, I understand why they aren’t getting results–the process they are using isn’t designed to actually help the...
This article first appeared on stickyminds.com Few people enjoy meetings that waste time in swirling discussions. Fewer still like meetings where their ideas and opinions are solicited and then ignored. Retrospective leaders (and anyone else who leads group...
Retrospectives are an essential part of Scrum. But too often, when I talk to Scrum teams, they tell me that they’ve stopped doing retrospectives. “We’ve run out of things to improve,” one ScrumMaster said. Another complained that after six sprints, they were saying...
This article first appeared on stickyminds.com. Not long ago, I received a call from someone who wanted to hold a retrospective. “Tell me about your goals for the retrospective,” I prompted. The requestor proceeded to describe what amounted to a mini-witch...
I’ve seen retrospectives help teams make major improvements. Yet, each time I talk to a group about retrospectives, someone always tells me, “Retrospectives don’t work.” Why might that be? My inquiries revealed eight common reasons behind...
This article first appeared on Stickyminds.com. Recently, a reader wrote to me with a concern about retrospectives. “We make decisions,” he wrote, “but we don’t have the discipline to carry them out. The team is starting to feel like...
When Diana Larsen and I teach a two-day Leading Agile Retrospectives workshop, the second day is stand up facilitation practice. We create the bare bones story of an iteration, then the class works together to design a retrospective. Each participant has a chance to...
I know it’s not sexy to pay attention to making meetings run better. It’s more fun to dig into tools and technology. But the truth is that an teams and companies waste an enormous amount of time in poorly run meetings. But, we need to pay attention to the...
A friend forwarded this email to me:I just wanted to share a tip that has made a world of difference for our scrum. I read through this book about 4 months ago And have implemented some of the practices in it. This has taken our retrospectives from being a 1 hour...
If you’ve been holding iteration retrospectives for a while, you know that timelines get old after a while. But when team skip the data part, each person works from his own data (which other people may not know) and his own interpretations (which other people...
People come up with all sorts of ideas and potential changes in retrospectives–usually more than the team can digest in one retrospective or, for changes, more than they can do in the next iteration. I often use dot voting to help the team prioritize and choose...
Recently someone asked how to avoid the blame game in retrospectives.Here are three things you can do.1) Establish working agreements (sometimes called “ground rules”) at the beginning of the retrospective. These are contracts the group members make with...
Pete Deemer shared a retrospective story on the Scrum Development list today:”I was doing a retrospective with a team that’s about 2 months / 3 sprints into scrum. Coming into the retrospective the team seemed to be feeling pretty low – they had yet to hit...
Marco Abis had a great post on retrospectives back in May. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll quote part of the post here:First of all why do I value retrospectives? Many different reasons but mainly because they let’s you:learn from experience bridge...
