Leanpub: Publish Early, Publish Often

Part 1: The Retrospective

If you only implement one thing from this ebook, make it this: launch a Retro (Retrospective) meeting in your team. The core mission of a Retro is to “inspect and adapt” the agile process over time as a team. This is how you do it:

It should be a regular meeting which is given priority by all who attend.
I’m not a fan of meetings, with few exceptions - this is one. This is the single greatest asset your team has, whether using an agile process or not. Everyone should make the time and respect the time of others. You’re not going to magically have this buy-in from all team members. You need to take them on a journey. Over time they will value it and therefore respect the time slot. Shoot for once every two weeks if you can. I’ve found that works best. Weekly is hard for new teams and longer than every 4 weeks can wear away at the trust that we’re trying to create.
Invite everyone from your Dev/Build Team: testers/QA, Project Managers, leads, key users/SMEs, architects, designers, product owners, developers and other stakeholders who you can get along. Provided this list is not 50 people long, you should manage with anywhere from 3 up to 25 in a Retro no problems.
Ensure that it’s a safe place and a democratic environment.
Someone will have to facilitate or drive the meeting, and it looks like it’s you again. But over time I suggest you rotate that responsibility around the group. Not everyone will want to do it, but it’s important you try. I’ve seen even the most shy personalities give the Retro facilitation “a shot” after months of meetings.
The key here is to build trust. It’s building trust first in the Retro, and then the things the Retro stands for: flat hierarchy, team decision making, actionable changes, leadership/management buy-in, experimentation, testing with data, and most of all: human-centric collaboration. Until Skynet writes all the line-of-business/enterprise software, it will be humans creating these things so the emphasis should be on fostering an environment where people can work together, and if you’re really lucky, even like each other!
Ensure that actions are acted upon and a follow up is conducted each meeting.
As you’ll see below in the quick playbook, each Retro should produce zero or more actions. These are usually tasks expressed as Chores (outlined later) on your backlog and generally assigned before the Retro meeting is over. Distribute the responsibility of enacting the Retro’s decisions around the group. Everyone should take part over time in carrying out the decisions of the meeting. The point is not to place blame, but for the team to support each other and find ways to clarify, assist, break up or redefine the priorities as necessary. As you mature you’ll notice sometimes you don’t have any actions: that’s fine, but try to encourage the discovery of actions, even small. Sometimes tasks will “roll over” from meeting to meeting without a resolution - this might mean it’s not really that important, or simply a hurdle the team needs to work around some other way. Remember, your agile process is about finding ways to do things better: inspect and adapt.
Try an experiment.
When a challenge arises or there is some question of “is there a better way?”, invite ideas and allow members to propose solutions. Experimentation is at the heart of agile so try to identify how an idea can be tested. Can one time-box a Spike (short investigation that uncovers more information) of a new way of doing something and report on the findings next Retro? Or perhaps, can the group alter slightly their process or workflow for a potentially better outcome? Review the experiment at the next meeting. Not everything needs qualitative data to support it. A “gut feel” is often validation enough given a quorum.

How-To: Simple Playbook for a pilot Retrospective

Schedule: A bi-weekly Retro is best given 1-1.5 hours for a comfortable pace and ample time for deep discussion on 2-3 of the most important topics.
Prepare: Find some post-it notes, enough for all members of the meeting, and large Sharpie markers. Make sure the room has a whiteboard or other common writing surface that everyone can see from their positions.
Prepare: Google for a simple ice-breaker - a game or short 10-15 minute activity which will get a laugh. It should be a team activity and the idea here is to have some fun and hopefully give space for members to relax a little and open up.
Prepare: Feel free to bring some snacks for the group to share. Conduct the meeting over lunch or towards the end of a Friday. Beer and pizza go down well, as do sugar-laden sweets. This is just another way to signal relaxation and the informality of the event. The goal is to build trust.
Kick off: When the meeting starts, introduce the Retrospective as an “Opportunity for the product/project team to innovate. The objective is to inspect the way we do things and then adapt what we’re doing over time to reduce waste. It’s also a time to reflect and slow down, to strengthen ourselves as a team and to get to know each other a little more.” or whatever variation appeals to your personal style.
Pull out a stopwatch and start it. This signals to everyone that while we’re here to have fun, it’s business too and there is an expectation that we respect the time each have made to participate. You don’t have to be hard and fast about time but if you can finish approximately on time, it will add to the ongoing trust we’re trying to build.
Launch into the ice-breaker. Try to wrap it up within 10-20 mins.
Review the actions from the last meeting (if not the pilot) and roll-over items that still need attention.
Move on to gathering ideas for discussion: Hand out the post-it notes and markers, encouraging folks to come up with any ideas for improvement, things they liked, didn’t like or were simply worthy of mention since the last Retro (or in the last 2 weeks if it’s the pilot). Give folks 10-15 mins for this idea generating stage. Explain that large format markers are helpful as they force only a few words - we should be trying to be concise. Invite members to stick their notes on the meeting room whiteboard/wall when they write down an idea. No need to wait for anyone else. You may need to set the example and quickly get something up on the wall yourself. As the facilitator, try to balance positive and negative sentiment, but not at the expense of honesty and identifying serious issues if you have them (which eventually, you will).
Check the stopwatch and close out this stage. Now you want to collate down the disparate ideas into larger groups. Usually “themes”. This way you can identify the top 2-3 that the group finds important and spend the remainder of the allotted time discussing those in depth. The easiest way to do this is called “dot voting”. Encourage the group to find the themes and as the discussion commences, move the sticky notes around to collate the groups or draw lines around the themes with the marker.
Dot voting: Explain the process first before anyone starts - Each person is allocated 2 votes which they indicate on the board/wall with the marker or by adding blank post-it notes. They want to clearly show to which group/theme their vote belongs. You can add rules like “only one vote per person per group” or increase the number of votes per person as you get practice at facilitation. The details don’t matter too much. I usually change the rules each meeting just to throw people off. So as not to bias each other, ask everyone to select in their mind where they will be placing their votes and indicate to the facilitator when ready. Then, once everyone in the group has signalled that they have selected where their votes will go, everyone gets up and marks their votes at once. You will find people respect the democratic rigour.
Identify the top 2-3 topics and dive deep with remaining time. Hopefully there is something like 30 or more minutes remaining at this stage. Allow the group to identify the highest voted themes and select someone who contributed to the theme to launch into a deeper discussion. Divide the remaining time on the stopwatch as evenly as possible into the top 2 or 3 items you choose to go deeper into. Try to move the speaker around the room to give everyone a chance to share their thoughts.
When a discussion seems to labor or go “off topic”, a good prompt is “well, what can we do about this?”. The Retro should be constructive. There is a time for frustration and even emotive language, where appropriate. But the goal is to make things better. Gently remind everyone of this and that it’s in their power to do something about it. This is where you start generating actions.
Build an action/todo list: This can start as early as the ice-breaker. eg. “No more Retro’s with cheese puffs! They make my hands all yellow!”. It’s ok not to be too serious. You can even write this one down.
As the discussions get more detailed, invite the group to suggest actions. Just before close of the meeting, invite members to volunteer to be assigned to each action and “own” seeing it through. This may not mean one person is entirely responsible for each action. But each action must have a “driver” - the person who organises activities and then reports on the action at the next meeting.
Close: Thank everyone for their time and remind everyone that even the Retro is “up for grabs”. That is, inspect and adapt the Retrospective meeting to suit your context. This basic play might be a good start but you should adapt it to suit your needs over time. This is being Agile.
Log the actions and assignments using your backlog or work tracking tool. If you can send a quick email or use some other mechanic to remind the team of the retro, your thanks and the actions they are about to undertake, then try that too. Do not forget this last step and impress on the next facilitator the importance. If the discipline of actions and following them up weakens, then the whole trust element of the activity weakens. Trust here is the key to the rest of your #agileforteams success, so make sure you preserve it by committing to track the action/todo list.

A great tool to help with structuring Retros is Retromat. Play around with this tool. It will soon become clear what you’re trying to get from a retro and how you can go about it. You may not need all of the components the tool suggests.

Questions and Actions

There is only one action and one question for this section. The action is schedule a meeting and have your first Retro. The question is this: did you do it?
It’s time to put this playbook to real work now. You should be able to convince your leaders to allow a “once off” meeting as an experiment into team building and innovation. You’ll get credit for trying and no boss wants to hear how her subordinate manager turned down an opportunity to “innovate”. If you can gain momentum here with a regular Retro, then you’re on your way to building trust which will set the stage for implementing the beginnings of a meaningful agile process.