There is usually a time in a project when the team forgets why things are done. Still for a long time we go on with the mechanics until someone questions them openly. The chicken continues to run.

It was obvious for all of us that, in their existing format, our retrospectives were useless. People would come up with well and not well items easily enough but the laundry list would never be acted upon and most of the subjects never discussed in depth. It was also clear to some of us that retrospectives have the potential to be greatly useful. Not to mention that if the retrospectives stop you might as well abandon agile altogether as evolution of the development process becomes impossible.

It so happened that a week before we tried to tackle this issue, Chris Sims facilitated a monthly meeting of the BayAPLN using group wisdom techniques. I set out to have the same applied to our retrospectives.

So for a few months now our retrospectives have followed the following process:
five minutes silence (and it is something to have silence in a meeting room) for each participant to think about something that was good or bad,
go a few times around the room to collect the notes (along with a brief explanation), one per participant and per round, highest priority should be given first, no duplicates,
once we have enough items, distribute voting stickers and get people to stand up, go to the board and vote (another nice addition to an otherwise sit down meeting),
tally the votes,
talk about the first few elected subjects,
after each subject assign an action item to one of the participants to either correct the problem or make sure good things continue to happen.

There are three important additional rules that make the process work. First each participant can put only one vote on a subject. Second the overall discussion is timed box. Third participants can ask for a conversation to be stopped (by means of a physical token like a stop or pause sign) and moved to a dedicated meeting.

The result of this is very positive as we are finally acting to continuously enhance our process. It also has an energising effect on the kick/close meeting by breaking the sit down routine.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 3:19 am and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.