Retrospective
#workhack
Helps with
- teams that want to make their social interaction more reflective.
- the initiation of continuous change processes.
- projects where it is important that those involved quickly establish a good working relationship.
- teams where there is always a bit of seething under the surface, but no one says openly what he/she thinks.
To be considered
- Moderation is very important: this meeting needs an open, trusting atmosphere and does not need to work simply through the agenda items.
- Do not address technical issues or problems with customers and other departments, etc.: it is about collaboration, i.e. reliability, communication, transparency, roles and culture.
- Focus on what can be changed – people who are not present cannot be changed
- Vary the agenda points if the three points “keep, drop, try” have been overused
- Decide on concrete actions that can be implemented directly by the team
Tools
- A well trained moderator
- Plenty of sticky notes and pens
- A meeting room that doesn’t seem too formal and official
Retrospective or Retro for short is a meeting from the software development framework SCRUM. You don’t have to know SCRUM, or use it, to introduce the retrospective. It is a regular meeting, the goal of which is to improve the collaboration of a project team or a department: “Keep, drop, try” is the agenda in a nutshell. In other words: what is going well and we want to keep doing? What are we not doing well together, that we need to drop? And finally: what new things do we want to try?
The retrospective is done at regular intervals – in SCRUM usually every 2 weeks, so that even small things that have a disruptive effect on the collaboration can be addressed and changed. The unusual thing about this format is the focus on collaboration. It is not about customers, about projects or timelines.
Helps with
- teams that want to make their social interaction more reflective.
- the initiation of continuous change processes.
- projects where it is important that those involved quickly establish a good working relationship.
- teams where there is always a bit of seething under the surface, but no one says openly what he/she thinks.
To be considered
- Moderation is very important: this meeting needs an open, trusting atmosphere and does not need to work simply through the agenda items.
- Do not address technical issues or problems with customers and other departments, etc.: it is about collaboration, i.e. reliability, communication, transparency, roles and culture.
- Focus on what can be changed – people who are not present cannot be changed
- Vary the agenda points if the three points “keep, drop, try” have been overused
- Decide on concrete actions that can be implemented directly by the team
Tools
- A well trained moderator
- Plenty of sticky notes and pens
- A meeting room that doesn’t seem too formal and official