Sometimes it’s hard to be in multiple places at the same.  Ok, it’s not possible to be in multiple places at the same time so with 10 teams and 100 or so people in the organization I’m working with and only myself and another coach I’m working with, I decided to create a retrospective room so teams can get some helpful tips and advice when we’re not able to help facilitate.

I had one goal in mind when creating this space which was to make it safe for teams retrospect in an environment where not all folks were accepting of doing retrospectives.  As a coach sometimes the best thing to do is back away and let the team figure things out on their own.   I had just finished facilitating a retrospective with a new team and could sense they wanted help improving but the ‘gotta have it all by this date‘ was too strong to influence them to try new things.

In the spirit of trying something new, I decided to just flat out ask them if they wanted me to sit with them for the next sprint and help out with a finger vote.  A few people had 5 fingers up and the rest averaged about 3 fingers.  I asked them again, but this time be honest and don’t worry about offending me.  “I am here to help, if you don’t feel like you can accept help based on the deadline just tell me“, I said.  The folks with 5’s kept the 5’s in the air but the average dropped to 2 fingers.  I thanked them for being honest and kept the door open in case they decided they wanted help later.

I figured creating a retrospective room was a good way for teams like this to experiment on their own in a safe environment.

The room:

The room is a nice, big open area with lotsa wall space.  It’s also the first thing people on the teams see when they come into the building.  This is near the backdoor entrance that only the team members use.  The point is, there was no need to advertise or tell people to use it.  People naturally came in and looked at the stuff on the walls to see what the hub-bub was about.

What’s in the room: Getting Started with Retrospectives

There’s an area that has info on the value of retrospectives, a sample meeting format and a sample checklist of things to do before getting started.   Posted on the papers are:

• The Agile principle for retrospectives (At regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.)
• Outline from Esther Derby’s and Diana Larson’s Agile Retrospective book (set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, closing)
• A section to post questions that myself and the other coach will answer
• Kerth’s Prime Directive (summary: people are doing the best they can with the situation at hand)

What’s in the Room: Sample Agenda

This area is helpful for teams to find a focus for the retrospective.  It’s marked as a sample, not the rule and the sample follows these steps:

1. Decide on a focal point
2. State agenda and do appreciations
3. brainstorm what went well, what didn’t go well in context of the focal point
4. brainstorm stop/start doing things
5. create action plan
6. re-usable area for well/not-well stickies

There’s also a basket labelled “Retrospective tool kit” that contains the stickies, markers and handouts of various techniques teams can try from Agile Retrospectives.

It also happens that there is a kitchen in this area off to the side so it becomes a great conversation piece when I grab my morning coffee.  When talking with folks I can reference the value of retrospectives and use fancy techniques like pointing to Kerth’s Directive to re-enforce the importance of retrospectives.

At the end of the day, it’s about doing anything I can think of to help my client and I love the creative aspect of what I do.  Oddly enough the team that inspired me to create this room has asked for help after that first retrospective.  While the whole team is struggling to accept change, there are a few people on the team that want to improve how they work and hopefully this room has shown them that I want to help while at the same time helping them feel more comfortable and safe about these changes.

Of course, now that the room has been in use for a couple of months it’s time for a refresh, Retrospective Room, Phase II is underway.

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My wife and I were working on our monthly budget last night and were looking at where we could free up some dough so we could put more money aside for un-expected stuff, debt, vacations and so on.

Seems like every once in while we talk about the same ideas for managing our budget without anything coming of those discussions.  Sound familiar?  How often in your personal life or work life do you have the same conversations over and over again only to never realize the benefit?  What’s the problem?

Discipline.  For us, there just hasn’t been any sense of urgency to change anything about how we manage our finances.  We know we “should” do something differently but we’re not disciplined about executing on it.

What I often hear from teams is that ‘we have no time’ to do our improvements.  There is just too much work to get done.  Bullshit I say.  What they are really saying is we haven’t made improving a priority.  Discipline is really, really tough.  It forces organizations and teams to prioritize and make real decisions instead of simply deciding not to decide.

A colleague I used to work with brought this phrase to my attention. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting. If you want your outcome to change, change your behavior and be disciplined with your approach.  If you choose not to behave differently and use “no time” as the excuse for not being disciplined the only results you’re likely to get are metrics that mean absolutely nothing.

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I’m a firm believer in retrospectives and the value that comes from a team committing to constant improvement.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been delivering Agile training to a wide range of folks from developers to testers to traditional PM’s to business folks and so on.  To demonstrate the power of retrospectives, at the end of the class we have a time-boxed retrospective that helps me deliver more value for future classes by understanding my customers and their needs.

Depending on how much time is left, as a class we decide which route to take for the retrospective.  Folks either brainstorm on stickies under the ‘well, not well, to try’ buckets or due to time constraint, people brainstorm aloud and I write them on the whiteboard.  Then we take 2 minutes to briefly talk about the point and vote on it’s validity.

Feedback from earlier sessions all f0llowed a similar pattern with people wanting more information and examples about their real situations and roles.  Through the first few sessions, this ‘not well’ item was constant so I adapted between classes to get more information related to the environment and real-life situations.

There’s a fine line between getting ‘into the weeds’ and staying on focus but through the feedback, more folks have found it useful to relate the Agile Manifesto values and principles to real examples and scenarios.  This particular class focuses on teaching Agile concepts and subsequent classes with the adjusted curriculum have said the real examples have been fantastic in helping them understand this magical thing called Agile.

While I do say ‘adjusted ciriculum’ the only thing that changes from class to class is relavent stories and examples that drive home the material, folks seem to really get it when they can relate.

I think it’s an important message that the attendees understand I am committed to constantly improving myself and the class delivery which gives them more of an understanding about why retrospectives are a powerful tool.

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This year seemed to fly by.  I sat here in front of Wordpress for a while trying to figure out just where to start with this post since this year was a blur.  Seems like just yesterday the calendar was rolling over to 2008 and now here we are in 2009 already.

Overall I am very pleased with 2008 both in my personal life and professional life.   Professionally I’m happier than I’ve ever been and I attribute that to the best working environment I’ve ever had. 

I attribute a great deal of this to my boss.  There are very few people that have that certain intangible quality that I like to refer to as the ‘it’ factor.   They know when to push, how to push and still have that great interpersonal quality that attributes to a really great environment to work in.  Everyone should be so lucky to work for someone like this at least once in their life.

Personally not much changed this year as anyone with small kids will understand.  You give up everything for your family, and especially your kids, and at the end of the day, the “daddy’s home!” war cry followed by both of them tackling me makes everything I do and sacrifice worthwhile.

What Went Well? I matured.  A lot. There was a time when I would let my emotions get the best of me, now thoughts seem to be much clearer in the face of high stress both in my professional and personal life.  I took the initiative to obtain Certified Scrum Master status and that was probably the single best thing that happened to me professionally. The wealth of knowledge and the contacts I gained as a result gave my confidence a huge boost and did wonders for my place of employment.  I look back at how our organization was running in January and there is a night and day difference as a result and I attribute that to the team sticking to our process despite the frustrations when we re-started our implementation of Scrum.  I am very pleased I was able to juggle so much work and inherit more responsibilities at Q4.  Working for start-ups for the last 6 or 7 years has really made it possible to context shift so often and I like to refer to myself as “the swiss army knife” every start-up needs.

I suppose this could be well and not well depending on who’s looking at it, but 2008 marks the first calendar year in 10 years that I didn’t buy a new car.  In my wife’s eyes, this went well but I’m pretty surprised I made it.  I simply get bored driving the same car for too long and trade far too often.  Maybe the addiction is kicked….or maybe I’ll by 2 this year to make up for it!

It took most of the year trying, but I started up the P90X workout program which is intense beyond belief.  After the first month I dropped 10 pounds and lost 7% body fat.  I wasn’t in bad shape to begin with but this program is a fantastic boot camp and it will kick your ass.  I highly recommend it but it takes a lot of time and dedication.

Finally, I managed to have a very good work/life balance.   I see folks posting on blogs or twitter about how tough it is to reach this balance but the bottom line to me is that nothing is more important than family.  Regardless of how much I complain about not having more time to read, blog, play music, exercise, work or play video games, I wouldn’t trade my family for anything.  I actually take great pride in the amount of stress I put on myself to maintain that balance.  If anything it makes me work smarter.

What Didn’t Go Well? 2008 went pretty well, I think the biggest thing that didn’t go well was relying far too much on email/twitter/IM instead of engaging in real conversations.   I think it’s just the nature of a digital world, but I need to rely more on phone and face-to-face conversation instead of IM, Twitter and email.  I find the more I use those tools, the less of a communicator I become in the sense of developing better interpersonal skills.

I got into a bit of a rut this year.  When you have small kids you tend to get into a routine which becomes hard to break at times.  We didn’t do anything exciting this year at all and I got a bit bored and frustrated.  This usually manifests itself in me thinking I need to go out and buy myself something to feel better; to give me a chance to ‘do something for myself since I deserve it’.

My P90X workouts fizzled after the first month.  First it was missing a day a week (it’s a 6-day per week program), then 2 days and finally I get in maybe one workout a week if I’m lucky.  It’s tough to find the time.

Not much didn’t go well.  2008 was a good year for me, I’m generally pleased with how it turned out.

What to Try Next Year? I’m not the New Year’s resolution type, why wait a whole year to try something different or improve yourself?  From a personal point of view, all I’m going to do is find more things to do with the family.  It’s such a pain to pack up 2 kids under 4 and go anywhere but kids are amazed by just about anything and it’s a blast to enjoy their discovery of anything new.

I’m going to take more time to play music and read as well.  The only thing I’ll be giving up is a few hockey games on TV per week which is doable.

Professionally, I’m going to continue to post frequently on Linked In, it’s a great place to network and a great way to keep my skills sharp.  I’m also going to attend more Agile/Scrum meetings or try to startup a local Scrum group on the west end of Toronto.  Q4 will continue to challenge me and I plan to spend more effort on making sure the team (or myself) doesn’t get into a rut.   More coaching through lunch and learns, more improvement by really focusing on business value and what can be done to improve processes and really live the 4 Scrum values.  Sometimes we worry about breaking a “rule” with the concern being that we have rules for a reason, but if those rules are the impediments they need to be changed.

I’m also looking forward to blogging more to share my experiences and contribute more to the Agile community.  It’s going to be a great year!

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InfoQ posted a great article recently on the challenges of adopting Scrum.   The number one item on the list was lack of organizational learning and whether or not they had intended to rank those items in order of importance, lack of learning through retrospectives is one of 2 key issues with adopting Scrum.

I safely interchange lack of organizational learning through retrospectives and thinking Agile is easy as the top 2 issues with adopting Scrum.  The Scrum process is in fact fairly simple, and there are some very simple approaches that agile coaches can use to facilitate learning across the organization.

Here are some quick tips, which include things I’ve used that have been met with success:

1. Retrospectives are not optional:  no matter what, have a retrospective at the end of every sprint.  3 simple questions:  What Went Well?  What Didn’t Go Well?  What to Try Next Time?
2. What to Try?  Write a solution: Retrospectives are for learning and discussion without action is useless.  We practice taking each “What to try” sticky and writing an action to address it.  We then prioritize and agree to include this solution with the next sprint.
3. Too much to remember at the end of the sprint?  Keep a log: This tip is from an article I read about retrospectives of which the link eludes me.  Write a sticky for each day in the sprint (IE: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3…Day N), stick it on the wall and provide red, green and yellow stickies for the team to write on.  When something good or bad  happens, write it down on the appropriate colour sticky.  If a good idea pops up, write it on a yellow one.
4. Scrub your solutions:  At the start of the retrospective, briefly chat about the solutions you wanted to try and gauge the output.   Was the solution obtained?  Is it still relevant?
5. Feed retrospective info up to management: Be transparent.  Scrum surfaces issues quickly and the sooner management knows about it the better.  This implies there is organizational trust but regardless, hiding problems to management is not a good thing to do.  If management doesn’t get it or thinks scrum is failing because there are too many problems, they need to be coached more closely.
6. Validate “What didn’t go well” items: People like to complain.  It’s human nature and oh so fun!  Retrospectives are not glorified bitching sessions and way to nip this in the bud is have each team member say something that didn’t go well out loud and let the team judge whether or not it’s a real problem.

These are a few techniques I’ve used during retrospectives and they can be very effective when used properly.  The key is to introduce different techniques when needed or when your retrospectives start getting stale.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on other techniques you’ve used in your retrospectives, after all, it’s all about learning right?

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I’m sure all teams go through a bit of a lull when it comes time for the end of sprint retrospective.  We’re following the same format of ‘what went well, what didn’t go well and what can we try next time’ format partially because that’s how the team did it before I started here.   Everybody takes 10 minutes to write down notes, we stick them on the wall, I read them and we have a time-boxed discussion on each if necessary.

I’ve always been a fan of the ‘discussion without action is useless’ mantra so I started tracking ‘what we wanted to try’ in order to measure success and see if we were actually improving.  We would pick the top 3 items from the list and decide those were the top priority things we needed to change over the next iteration.

A co-worker recently suggested Agile Retrospectives by Ester Derby and I do plan on reading it this weekend but I came up with a technique I wanted to try in the meantime.  Sometimes our retrospectives end up turning into complaining sessions and ‘what didnt go well’ ends up being more like ‘this part of my job is hard so it sucks’.  I also noticed not all team members get involved at the same level as other team members and to make a long story short, the same ol’ routine is just getting stale.

So the big idea this sprint is to make it more interactive.  Instead of having the team write notes and stick them to the wall, we’ll go around the room and each team member will say 1 thing from the ‘what went well’ bucket.  That team member will write it down and the rest of the team can vote or agree on it.  That’s the easy part, the real reason for introducing this method is for the ‘what didn’t go well’ and ‘what to try’ buckets. The concept is that after each team member says something that didn’t go well, the team can vote or agree on whether or not it’s a valid issue or just complaining.  We’ll then immediately go into what we can try to make that ‘not well’ thing go well next time and stick it on the ‘improvement’ log we have posted to the wall if the team agrees it’s a priority.

Seems like common sense to me, hopefully it’ll bring back some life into the retrospective.

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