Using Data in Problem-Solving

Many problems are easier to solve when you have data. However, there is a difference between having data and using data. Several years ago, I worked wit an organization that was experiencing system outages. After months of outages and no effective action, they...

Solving Symptoms

Recently, I attended two retrospectives.  Different teams, different states, different facilitators. I’m usually on the other side, leading retrospectives. Both retrospectives followed the “make lists” pattern.  One made two lists  “What worked...

Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives II

Slides from a talk I gave on Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives: Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives View more presentations from Esther Derby And take a look at PROMOTING DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING IN RETROSPECTIVES.

Promoting Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives

“The thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us where we need to be.”  attributed to Albert Einstein I have  this niggling concern about retrospectives. I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short,...

Agile Retrospectives: A Primer

From time to time, I hear from people who aren’t realizing value from their retrospectives. When I probe to understand the situation, I understand why they aren’t getting results–the process they are using isn’t designed to actually help the...

Five Tips for Retrospective Leaders and Meeting Moderators

This article first appeared on stickyminds.com Few people enjoy meetings that waste time in swirling discussions. Fewer still like meetings where their ideas and opinions are solicited and then ignored. Retrospective leaders (and anyone else who leads group...

Revitalize Your Sprint Retrospectives

Retrospectives are an essential part of Scrum. But too often, when I talk to Scrum teams, they tell me that they’ve stopped doing retrospectives. “We’ve run out of things to improve,” one ScrumMaster said. Another complained that after six sprints, they were saying...

Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail

I’ve seen retrospectives help teams make major improvements. Yet, each time I talk to a group about retrospectives, someone always tells me, “Retrospectives don’t work.” Why might that be? My inquiries revealed eight common reasons behind...

Making Retrospective Changes Stick

This article first appeared on Stickyminds.com. Recently, a reader wrote to me with a concern about retrospectives. “We make decisions,” he wrote, “but we don’t have the discipline to carry them out. The team is starting to feel like...

Tips for Retrospective Facilitators

When Diana Larsen and I teach a two-day Leading Agile Retrospectives workshop, the second day is stand up facilitation practice. We create the bare bones story of an iteration, then the class works together to design a retrospective. Each participant has a chance to...

Making Retrospectives (and Other Meetings) Work Better

I know it’s not sexy to pay attention to making meetings run better. It’s more fun to dig into tools and technology. But the truth is that an teams and companies waste an enormous amount of time in poorly run meetings. But, we need to pay attention to the...

Improving Retrospectives

A friend forwarded this email to me:I just wanted to share a tip that has made a world of difference for our scrum. I read through this book about 4 months ago And have implemented some of the practices in it. This has taken our retrospectives from being a 1 hour...

Two more ways to gather data in retrospectives

If you’ve been holding iteration retrospectives for a while, you know that timelines get old after a while. But when team skip the data part, each person works from his own data (which other people may not know) and his own interpretations (which other people...

Prioritizing with dots in a retrospective

People come up with all sorts of ideas and potential changes in retrospectives–usually more than the team can digest in one retrospective or, for changes, more than they can do in the next iteration. I often use dot voting to help the team prioritize and choose...

Blame-proofing retrospectives

Recently someone asked how to avoid the blame game in retrospectives.Here are three things you can do.1) Establish working agreements (sometimes called “ground rules”) at the beginning of the retrospective. These are contracts the group members make with...

A retrospective story

Pete Deemer shared a retrospective story on the Scrum Development list today:”I was doing a retrospective with a team that’s about 2 months / 3 sprints into scrum. Coming into the retrospective the team seemed to be feeling pretty low – they had yet to hit...

Marco Abis answers the question “Why do retrospectives?”

Marco Abis had a great post on retrospectives back in May. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll quote part of the post here:First of all why do I value retrospectives? Many different reasons but mainly because they let’s you:learn from experience bridge...

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