Get a room

The prime directive for retrospectives described by Norman Kerth in his book Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, emphasises the key point that safety is paramount for success. Airing your dirty laundry in public is never easy, so the degree of safety a team feels is directly affected by the environment they conduct retrospectives in.

If the team thinks they are being judged by co-workers, or by those who might determine their pay, career progression and ultimately success, then they are not likely to feel safe. Under these circumstances any retrospective is likely to be superficial at best, pointless at worst.

For a team to truly improve, they need to show vulnerability, and to do this, they need to feel safe. Part of feeling safe is having privacy.

The easiest way of having privacy is to get a room. This may seem simple and obvious, but its effects are very powerful. The team needs to feel they can talk about absolutely anything, safe in the knowledge that ‘it will go no further than these four walls’.

Key benefits

Getting a room for your retrospective session pays back dividends. It ensures that you are getting the most from your investment of time by encouraging open and honest dialogue about the things that matter, as opposed to ignoring the big issues.

Having a room will change the team’s attitude to retrospectives. Not having the trappings of everyday working life in front of them emphasises the importance of the time spent in the room. Making the investment in the session by going to a room rather than just staying in the team space sets the tone for investment in continuous improvement itself.

A further significant benefit to getting a room is that it removes many other distractions that plague the modern workplace. Moving to a room reduces the amount of disruption from emails, any other kind of work or people approaching the team. One way you can further this is to agree to ban various items from the room such as phones, laptops etc.

How to make it work

If the team has a permanent room to themselves, then lucky them – most teams we have worked with don’t. If not, then book a meeting room on a recurring basis.

When are picking a room, choose what works best for the team. If they are not happy with the overhead of going upstairs to the meeting suite on the ninth floor, make sure that the booking is close to the team’s work area. Alternatively, as mentioned in the section Take it outside, it may be desirable to get completely away from the workspace.

Make sure you can’t be overheard or disturb anyone else, so you can laugh and let off steam without inhibiting the outcome of the retrospective. Ben worked with a team who wrote software for electronic trading systems. In a retrospective session, they had a colleague come looking for a member of the team to answer a question to allow them to continue their work. The effect of that interruption, the removal of one of the team members and the subsequent break killed the retrospective. The team struggled to pick up where they left off. At the next retrospective, one of the team members came to the session with an immediate improvement idea. They suggested that they put a sign on the door ‘Retrospective in Progress’ in order that people looking for a member of their team realise that it is a meeting that they can’t interrupt. The rest of the team immediately agreed with the proposal, adopting it into their ongoing way of working.

The layout of the room is important too. Ideally the room layout should be an open space with seats in a circle, as Esther Derby and Diana Larsen point out in Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. It may seem superficial but the physical barrier that a table brings also introduces a psychological barrier between members of the team.

Don’t skimp on space and whiteboards to display artefacts from the team and the mandatory sticky note invasion, but also to get creative, draw diagrams, pictures, grids, emotions … whatever comes up! If this is not possible then try to get a room with enough flip charts. Though be warned – super sticky Post-it notes are easily rearranged on whiteboards, but it’s much harder if you’ve stuck them on flip charts.

We worked in a building in London that had meeting rooms where two sides of each room were floor-to-ceiling windows. It was up a few floors, so a nice environment for retrospectives, just not very practical. In a retrospective that Ben was facilitating the team ran out of room on the whiteboards, but they simply kept going onto the windows. The point here is to adapt your environment to your needs, or adapt your needs to your environment.

Other teams in the same building commandeered empty offices to hold their retrospectives. They felt that although the rooms were small, it was a price worth paying for privacy.

Although it’s very important that people can visualise the topics of conversation, it’s also necessary to retain the level of safety built in to the retrospective. As with good test practice, we should tear down our retrospective environment, by removing all the information we put on the walls and disposing of it safely.