Everybody’s got their own version of the perfect Sprint Retrospective. If you’re struggling to come up with something that works, here’s one that I do regularly.
- Get a meeting room. Ensure it’s just the scrum team there.
- Get a board up and draw a few columns:
- What we should do more of
- What we should do less of
- What we should stop doing
- Give everyone a pack of post-its and pens. Get them to (in their own time) fill out the post-its and apply them to the appropriate column. Give them plenty of time to do this.
- Go through each of the points and:
- Get each person who raised the point to explain it.
- Try and apply groupings to all the different points.
- If there are actions, note them down.
- Finally, give people 2-3 ticks and ask them to designate them to specific groupings. Then just focus on the groupings that people are most excited by.
I find this works for most sprint retros. I often break it up however to keep things interesting. Variations include:
- Individually speaking to Product Owners and collating their feedback. Then introducing that in a separate session with the team so they can see another perspective of their performance.
- Individually speaking to members of the team and doing a similar session to the above.