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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Appreciative Inquiry: Facilitation Lessons from an On-the-Spot Retrospective

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by Cara Turner in Agile, Facilitation, Retrospectives, Scrum

≈ 4 Comments

I’ve been reading recently about teams who only focus on positive retrospectives – never asking “what did we do wrong”, and focusing instead on “what can we do better” – with great results. While the idea makes sense to me, I wasn’t sure how I could introduce the concept to my team.

But today the team decided to bring the retrospective forward by half a day, to this afternoon instead of tomorrow morning.* And being a “last responsible moment” kind of planner, as well as a “Don’t prepare, just show up” kind of improvisor when the situation dictates, I headed off to the shops to grab snacks & ponder which format would be best for the team. They’re doing pretty well, and the sprint review was a success, but nothing in particular sprang to mind on the walk.

Armed with my prompt-list of retrospective activities and a vaguely related transcription of activity formats, I headed to the room & got going, praying that inspiration would strike. It didn’t – or at least, it didn’t seem to.

Fortunately I follow a pretty standard format which the team knows well, so we got started with the sprint metaphor followed by review of the sprint artifacts. By which time I was sure inspiration would strike. Still no. Except for the nagging idea to ‘put it to the team’.

So when we got to the “Gather Data” section of the retrospective, I turned to my list of standard activities, and read them to the team, saying “this is the list I usually work from, let’s see what makes sense for us today”.

“Try appreciative inquiry

Instead of looking at where to improve, look at what’s working well and how you can build on that. Use short, pair interviews to explore questions such as, “When were you at your best on our last sprint?” “Who else was involved?” and “What conditions were present?” After the interviews, put the pairs together in groups of four or six (two pairs or three pairs together) to find common themes.“

From Esther Derby’s blog 7 Ways to Revitalize Your Sprint

I explained each one as I went along, and watched the team weigh up each option. Top of the list was Esther Derby’s Appreciative Enquiry (see right) – a technique I hadn’t used with this team before.

Another format that seemed valid to me was “We’re Good At / Worry About / Wonder About” since there are changes afoot, but one of the members pointed out we’d done that about three sprints ago – I love that they respect variety! – and asked about Appreciative Enquiry. This team is pretty logic-focused and also contains quite a skeptic, so I was surprised when they all agreed – essentially to work in pairs, ask each other nice questions, and feed back on their pair’s behalf.

I’m pretty sure that if I’d planned this activity without their input, it would have bombed. But because they’d chosen it, everyone got stuck into the exercise. There was a brief moment as they wondered what they’d got themselves in to, with a bit of ‘do we have to answer all of the questions’ but since the questions are simple and follow each other well, it wasn’t much of an objection. And what was really interesting was how consistent the answers to the questions were – with variety indicative of personality rather than differences of opinion. This really emphasised how well they work as a unit.

To take the leap of making all this ‘fluffy stuff’ actionable, I had the team answer the question “How can we apply this knowledge to future sprints?” in round-robin format. From this we generated some very concrete goals and actions – concrete enough for the team to feel comfortable committing to two – a change in work patterns (limit WIP) and a specific action to change their environment setup to reduce external dependencies.

So my facilitation lessons from Just Showing Up today were:

1. It’s okay to just show up – when everyone knows how to make an informed decision
2. Fluffy stuff can go down well with an outcomes-focused team – as long as we work towards clear and concrete goals
But most importantly:
3. As always, the best way to make sure everyone’s engaged in the process is to include them in the decision making.

I think the team needs to have a relatively good understanding of the retrospective process for this to work (“Ha” in the Shu-Ha-Ri scale), but it’s magic to see.


* We usually have the retro straight after review, but the post-holiday period for work and school had meant some parent-focused rescheduling.

Activities for Retrospectives – Collected Links & Lists

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Cara Turner in Agile, Facilitation, Games, Links, Retrospectives, Scrum

≈ 4 Comments

Once we move beyond the normal “What Worked Well / What Didn’t / What Can We Improve” retrospectives, there’s a whole world of interesting activities to engage and focus participants – and it’s growing fast :D

These sites provide a good starting point:

Retrospective Wiki: Retrospective Plans
This section of the wiki includes quite a few complete retrospective plans such as 6 Thinking Hats; Everyday Retrospective; ‘Start / Stop / Continue / More of / Less of’ Wheel. Even if you don’t use the plans in their entirety, they give a good idea of how to structure a retrospective, from activities to timing. I like this whole site – it’s worth looking through.

Extract from Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great
This PDF extract of Esther Derby and Diana Larson’s classic, kindly provided by the publishers The Pragmatic Bookshelf, includes the following games: Timeline, Triple Nickels, Team Radar, Force Field Analysis, Fishbone.

Partnerships and Possibilities
Diana Larsen and Sharon Buckmaster’s blog, containing a variety of agile writings. Filter on Retrospectives for quite a long list of activities – either blogged or linked to other blogs. I particularly like Circles and Soup, as well as the Appreciative Retrospective – I’ve used both ;-)

vinylbaustein
Thorsten O. Kalnin invents really interesting creative retrospectives. Try Agile Speed Dating, Agile Olympics (Golf, Tennis and Bowling have been added so far), or the irresistible StrategicPlay® simulations using Lego.

Gamestorming Games Wiki
This site is has a variety of facilitation games, and is more of a general facilitation resource, but I’ve used some activities in retrospectives to great effect. It’s a particularly useful site if you’re looking for ‘out of the box’ ideas.
I strongly recommend purchasing the Gamestorming book – it’s a fabulous resource to have on hand to flip through when you’re looking for inspiration.

Other links:

This conversation on the LinkedIn Certified ScrumMasters Group: Creative ways of conducting retrospectives has some interesting ideas from contributors.

Why I Care About Retrospectives

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Cara Turner in Agile, Facilitation, Retrospectives, Scrum

≈ Leave a comment

As a Scrum Master, I care about all the Scrum “events” – Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Sprint Demo / Review and of course, the Retrospective. Do I care more about the retrospective? I’m not sure – but I certainly put a lot of effort into each one.

Partly that’s because I think it’s really important to make the most out of every meeting, and since each sprint is different, I try to make sure that the retro fits the overall needs of the team. And partly it’s because in my experience retrospecting has been a sorely neglected part of project management (in all industries, not just software) so there’s still a lot to learn about it. But since it’s arguably the most valuable tool we have for continuous improvement – to look back, identify strengths, clarify areas for improvement, and set plans in place to do so – I figure it’s worth putting extra energy in.

The retrospective is at the core of the Agile principle “Inspect and Adapt”. (Marc Bless unpacks this principle very nicely).  It’s particularly valuable in complex environments, where there’s a high degree of uncertainty and teams must be able to adapt to changing information and changing needs – which happens to be the realm of most software projects.

As an ex-Project Manager, I’ve been on projects where everyone knew we were veering off-course, with a collective feeling of “why doesn’t anyone do anything about this” hanging in the air – but we were always too late or under too much pressure by that time to do anything other than hold our breath and hope we can avoid disaster.

The ability to pause regularly to assess our overall progress, identify corrective action and implement it, seemed like an impossible luxury – or the final straw, when in extreme cases we had to go cap-in-hand to the client and explain why we couldn’t meet the time / scope / budget commitments. And while necessity may be the mother of invention, in these situations very few team members have much creative energy left.

Of course, when we had delivered a project on time & in budget (it’s a rare but not entirely mythical thing), we were immediately put under pressure to deliver more in the next project, with little opportunity to review what made this project different and be able to harvest that learning.

As I moved into an Agile environment, the focus of my retrospectives naturally shifted from projects to teams, and to me this is where the most value – and greatest challenge – lies.

Developing strong teams is one of the greatest assets a company can invest in. When a team is collaborating openly, sharing collective knowledge and engaging in constructive disagreement, it becomes increasingly easy to identify and eliminate blockages, smoothing the ability to complete work, and move on to the next challenge in a continuously improving – and highly functioning – team.

A lofty goal, and frequently considered the “snake-oil” of agile salesmen, this can only really be achieved when teams become dedicated to owning their improvements in an organization that supports and participates in the changes identified, over a sustained period of time.

At their heart, I see regular retrospectives as a key tool for team transformation, which help teams move from being a fragmented group of individuals reacting to corporate pressure, to trusting, self-organizing, motivated and directed teams, contributing to corporate discussions.

Yes, I have lofty ideals. Fortunately Agile provides me with a lot of practical ways to implement them :D

Cara

I'm Cara Turner and I live by the mantra “Feedback is the breakfast of champions!”.
Read more about me and follow me on twitter @Cara_Faye

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