Retrospective is an event that was born from the Scrum framework, which takes place at the end of the Sprints and in which the team analyzes itself during the course of the recently finished Sprint to identify improvement opportunities.
Retrospectives open the door to continuous team improvement. In them, a space is established where the participation of the whole team is encouraged, where in addition to collaboratively identifying aspects to improve, the successes achieved by the team are valued.
In this post I am going to share with you, from my point of view, some important aspects to keep in mind to make your retrospectives more effective.
Let’s go with it!
Trust
Retrospectives are fundamentally based on trust, since it is impossible to transparently expose aspects of the team for improvement without it.
It is a shame that opportunities for improvement don’t come to light because a person doesn’t have enough trust to share them due to fear of being judged or criticized.
On the other hand, when aspects for improvement are exposed, it is easy for someone to identify with any of them. In these cases, when there isn’t enough trust, they can be interpreted as indirect personal attacks or criticisms rather than opportunities for improvement for the team as a whole.
If you want to know how we can improve trust, I suggest you take a look at this post.
Participation
In order to take full advantage of retrospectives and for the team to be enriched by different opinions, it is necessary that all team members without exception express their points of view. For this reason it is very important to promote the participation of the team as a whole.
In Make your meetings more productive, Javier explained to us the role of the “energizer”, who is in charge of encouraging everyone to participate, as well as making sure that everyone can express their point of view and that speaking turns are respected.
Introducing the energizer role, or doing exercises that encourage participation, will make it easier for the whole team to get involved in the retrospective.
Commitment
Once the improvements have been exposed and prioritized in a collaborative way, the team can commit to work on one or more of them in the coming weeks, with the aim of seeing if they have been fulfilled in the next retrospective.
For this reason, it is necessary for the team to have sufficient commitment skill to fulfill what they agreed to, otherwise the opportunities for improvement will not be exploited and the team will not progress.
A motivated team will increase their commitment ability. For this reason it is important to take advantage of the retrospectives not only to detect points for improvement, but also to recognize the achievements obtained and make all team members part of them.
To end…
In this post, I have shared with you three aspects that I believe should be taken into account to make retrospectives more effective.
I am sure there are more important aspects than what I have explained, so I will be happy to learn from you. I encourage you to share your experiences and opinions!
