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So, yesterday I sat with the Senior Scrum Master – or should I rather say with my Scrum Master, and went over some basic meeting rules to follow to run any review and retrospective. She explained a new method being used now in the next lot of sessions she is going to be doing for the other teams. The Product Owner can participate in the retrospective but they must not be allowed to dominate the session, cannot in any way attack the Team and the Scrum Master must interject if the Product Owner over steps the boundaries. The previous two sessions which I observed, followed a different method to the one I will use on Monday, but the same basic guidelines. There I repeated it again without explanation of what these ‘guidelines’ are.
Before I expand on these steps, one thing in particular that would be mentioned is that the team may have just failed a sprint or not received the feedback during the review that they had hoped for. They may be disheartened, angry, and despondent and even by the beginning of the retrospective just plain ticked off! None of these negative emotions are conducive to a session where they need to participate objectively and get value from. The retrospective has to take place, it can’t be postponed to another day, and this would waste a day, so the only alternative is to manage these emotions.
This will seem like a lot to fit into 1 and a half hours but it is essential to time-box it. It cannot be done in less time, you just don’t get through things effectively and teams will feel rushed and get the impression that you don’t really care what they have to say. Going on for longer is like cutting a finger off slowly, wrap up each section in no more than 15 minutes. If some take more and some less its fine, but keep an eye on the time.
So before the retrospective session actually starts, if it is apparent how the team is feeling at that point, the Scrum Master would acknowledge the feedback/responses from the stakeholders and that it’s completely understood that the Team is feeling the way they are. The Scrum Master would ask the team, just for the retrospective, to check their feelings in ‘at the door’ and once it is done they are welcome to ‘check them back out’. The important thing is to make the team understand that the retrospective is a Value session, a safe place, not for blame or accusations and not designed to make anyone feel guilty, feel like a failure or get defensive. The aims should be clear to the team and reassurance given that this is purely for value and learning. Steer clear from such words as ‘post-mortem’ which implies something less than positive preceded the session.
Of course it will not be so easy but with use of the second point (Trust), the exercise should encourage the team to relax and open up.
Every session or meeting has a purpose. Especially in the early days transitioning to Scrum, there will be confusion and resistance. To get all participants to co-operate, first they must see the purpose in what they are doing. Understand that even though at first some things may seem unclear or confusing, there is an underlying purpose. Usually people will be less strained to follow any new process if they at least understand the purpose.
Explaining the purpose of the retrospective is basic. What are we going to do – look back on the last sprint, express how we felt about it and why?
This is designed to gain the trust of the Team, make them relax and focus on the positives that they can take away from the retrospective.
An example of the activity which we have performed in the retrospectives which I had previously observed, were:
The Team chose one picture from a whole lot of pictures which best described how they felt about the last sprint – and explained why they chose that picture.
The other one, which we will use in the session with my team on Monday, is the team would write five words, each word on a sticky that described how they felt about the sprint. No pictures, no phrases. Only one word. One person from the team would stick these onto the board, grouping similar words together.
At this point before you ask the team why they chose those words, notice if the team is showing signs of stress, upset/anger or frustration that they may not have shown when the retrospective started (perhaps they did have a good sprint, or thought they did, but for some reason the stakeholders were not as impressed as the Team had expected. They may not have revealed their emotions prior to this exercise and in this case it is now that you would mention to the team that you recognize that they have a problem with [noting a thread that comes out clear from the words on the stickies e.g. feel like they have no clarity on direction]. At this point you can ask them to ‘check their feelings in’ and explain why. When exactly this is done can be at either stage but the Scrum Master would need to sense when this is best placed. If he/she is paying close attention to the team and has been in touch with them over the duration of the sprint, they will know when the right time is.
In this session the Team will be asked to close their eyes for 2 minutes (no really, sit there with their eyes closed and time the two minutes). In this time they should be asked every 15 seconds, feeling questions such as:
Eight questions are the most you can ask and one should try to ask the kind of feeling questions that are pertinent to the real experiences the team went through that were obvious during the sprint but also some general questions which may bring to light some issues that you did not pick up during the sprint from your reaction with the Team.
Another representative from the team (not the same one who stood up previously), would act as the scribe and write the feelings on the board. This should be a very short sentence, avoiding waffle and ‘unnecessary emotional padding’ that will detract from the real underlying feeling. Take two feelings from each person, including the one of the scribe.
Once these are listed on the board, divide the team into groups of 2 – these are called ‘Murmur Groups’ (they will sit there and murmur to themselves or one another – really, but this is fine, it’s what you want). If there is an uneven number, the Scrum Master would then join the group or make one group of 3 people.
An alternative method of data gathering would be to draw the four quadrants and ask the team to rather answer four questions in their murmur groups. They can answer more than once per section but have to answer at least once per section, again grouping similar answers. They would then later vote on these groups as described further down.
The team would be asked to note on stickies solutions, insights, more feelings and any comments related to the feelings that they see on the board. On all the feelings which are on the board, not just their own feelings. They would put these up on the board and group them into similar feelings. *a note here* Keep this short – use a thick marker and normal 2.5″ square stickies or normal memo paper. This will make it easier to group and narrow things down to concise input and not long convoluted solutions.
Then give the team 3 red sticky dots and ask them to vote on the group that is most important to them to solve. They can put all the dots on the same group or split them over more than one. Once all the votes are placed, choose the highest or two of the highest if they are close and throw the others away. No hoarding!
Once grouped we move onto the last section of the session.
Now the Scrum Master can either write down the actions or ask one of the team again to act as a scribe. I have not yet seen a team member do this but how effective either option would be would probably depend on how interactive the team is being, how co-operative they are being in the session and how much ownership you want the team to take of the action list. By ownership I don’t mean to solve their own problems and action this but take ownership of making the list really about what they want to see done. Do this on a flip chart page or you can take a photograph and print it out on A3 – either way it must visible and transferable after the meeting.
This action list would be such things as:
Specifically what actions do they want to see addressed in the next sprint to try to avoid the same issues coming up again in the next retrospective? Some things cannot be solved overnight but some issues are so important to the team that they feel would be impediments in the next sprint.
The goal or goals for the next sprint usually arise from this action list, identify and suggest a few to the team. You can also ask them to identify their own goals from this list of actions. This is useful when you want to encourage teams to take ownership of the goals; some teams need this more than others.
Take the action list away with you and put it up in the team room – and action it.
