Paperback Edition available on Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble.

We present you: A new agile book with many exercises for facilitating retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they bring, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.

This is a book for agile coaches, scrum masters, project managers, product managers and facilitators who already have some experience with retrospectives. 

With this book we are offering a half year of our work to the community to help teams all over the world to get better in doing retrospectives.

Want to stay informed about retrospectives and future versions of our book?

Join us at eepurl.com/Mem7H or join Luis Goncalves Monthly Webinar right here.

This book is being translated into many languages, they are all available on Leanpub.

Ben Linders & Luis Gonçalves

About the authors

We are both active bloggers at www.benlinders.com and https://luis-goncalves.com. On our blogs we share our experiences on several agile and lean topics including retrospectives.

During the years we have conducted many different kinds of retrospectives. We think that practicing different exercises helps to develop your own personal toolbox with retrospective exercises and get more value out of them. If you want to get some extra ideas you can access to Agile Retrospectives Ideas.

Notes:

• This book is also available on InfoQ: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
• Paperback Edition is published. Get your copy at Lulu, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect

Robert Louis Stevenson

Retrospectives have been the pulse of continuous improvement for teams since the boom in popularity of agile methods. For organisations who only inspected a project after it had delivered (or not), moving to a bi-weekly or monthly improvement cycle was a revolutionary shift, but why stop there? Unfortunately many teams repeat the same process over and over, so their retrospectives become flat, unrewarding and get discarded for not adding value.  This can have slow down improvement and demotivate team members. 

Learn how to improve retrospectives and avoid stagnation, with fifty ideas designed to help you enhance and energise your continuous improvement effort. This book will help you get better outcomes from retrospectives and from any continuous improvement initiative. It will help you consider how best to prepare for retrospectives, generate innovative insights, achieve valuable outcomes, improve facilitation techniques, keep things fresh and maybe even how to have a bit of fun whilst doing it.  

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone who undertakes continuous improvement of any sort, especially those looking to get better outcomes from retrospectives, either as a participant, facilitator, coach or manager of teams. We include ideas for people with varying levels of experience. So, whether you are just getting started with Scrum and retrospectives, or a veteran of continuous improvement looking to fine-tune or get new ideas, or if your retrospectives have become a bit stale and need re-invigorating, there are ideas in here to support you.  

Many of the ideas and concepts are universally applicable and will be of use to anyone trying to make improvements in any industry or walk of life. They are not limited to the confines of software development, where we work.

Who is this book not for?

This book is not for someone without any knowledge of retrospectives. We are making an assumption that our readers will probably understand what a retrospective is, as well as how to go about using them. If you have little or no experience participating in or facilitating retrospectives please read another book first. There are plenty of good books and materials out there that introduce the basic processes and formats.

Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better.

This book condenses down over eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practical advice on how to make your retrospectives even more effective including topics such as:

• Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
• Picking just the right materials
• Facilitating retrospectives with ease
• Dealing with common retrospective smells
• Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
• A checklist for preparation
• Ensuring retrospectives result in change

Read the Foreword (available in the preview) by Agile Retrospectives's author, Diana Larsen to see why this book is for you.

Hard copies now available

Prefer a hard copy (paper version) or want to give one away as a gift? Order one online at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Yet another retrospective book? Why? There are already quite a few..

Yes! And that’s exactly the reason. I teach workshops on retrospectives (among other topics) to ScrumMasters, team-level and enterprise Agile coaches. And my observation is that despite of all the ocean of information on this topic, there still seems to be a big gap between the wisdom that is in the books and what people actually do in office meeting rooms under a lit sign: "Don’t enter. Retrospective on air".

Your feedback is warmly welcome at info@retrospective-cheat-sheet.com

Paperback is available on Amazon!

In this book, Jutta Eckstein examines how retrospectives –originally a kind of a facilitated workshop for gaining feedback– can be applied conceptually to initiate and implement organizational change. Technically, retrospectives were an instrument for a group to examine a past joint period of time and learn from that. The participants of a Retrospective for Organizational Change do not share a joint past, yet they learn from their different individual experiences and use this as a basis to form a shared future. The main strength is to leverage the experiences of a diverse group. Especially if the change is dynamic, which means the approach toward the goal is unclear or if it is complex, where the goal itself is in-determinate, Retrospectives for Organizational Change can provide a way to support the change. This book covers the conceptual idea of using Retrospectives for Organizational Change and additionally reports on the feedback and experiences of its practical application.