In the "Generating Insights" phase of a retrospective, the "Group Mind" activity provides a way for teams to discover where their thinking converges and quickly identify common concerns.
The retrospective leader (RL) helps the team form three or four small groups of team members--pairs or triads, depending on the size of the team. Each small group takes no more than eight to ten minutes to brainstorm all the issues (or ideas for action) facing the team and write each one on a separate sticky note. The retrospective leader challenges the sub-groups to go for quantity of issues over quality. Every...
Does your team have Working Agreements? (WA’s)
Effective teams think about how they will accomplish their work together before they begin working. They describe the levels of performance and professionalism they want to achieve, then record them in Working Agreements.
WA’s cover such areas as:
What does “done” mean for us?
What will meetings look like for us? (e.g., type, number, frequency, duration, attendance expectations, decision-making, etc.)
What Agile engineering and project management practices and methods will we incorporate?
What interactions, teamwork and collaboration will best support our work? (e.g., communication flows, conflict, feedback, continuous learning, social time, fun!)
Effective teams regularly take stock...
So many teams complain about the "do nothing" retrospective. Team meetings can remain results-free for many reasons (possibly the topic of another post…and anyway, I’m sure Esther Derby must have written about it ;-) ). However, one way to stimulate team members to implement action plans is to follow the energy.
Stig Efsen, Trifork Scrum coach, invented a new way to help teams move the continuous improvement ideas from retrospectives into real action. In an “Agile Retrospectives” workshop last January, he showed our workshop group how to use Planning Poker for a list of ideas for actions.
About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives.