What can we share from a retrospective?

We talk a lot about having a safe space for a retrospective, about creating that environment where it’s safe to open up and honestly talk about the real problems. We tell management that they should have no expectation of knowing about the specific conversations that went on inside a team’s retro, and that’s correct.

Larger retrospectives

In my Retrospective Magic course, I’m mostly focused on team based retrospectives, and I was asked this week what needs to change when we’re doing a larger one?

Bad documentation

I grew up in a large city, and when I first moved out to a small town, one of the first differences I noticed was how everyone gives directions based on how things used to be.

Everyone should be able to update the board

Back in the 1990’s, version control wasn’t very common and I recall working with one of the first teams I’d been on, that was using it. The company had chosen to only buy a single license for one person on the team, which meant that any time we wanted to check something into version control, we would email our changes to this one guy and he would do the merge and then email back a copy of the latest code.

Why don’t we collaborate more?

In an office environment, it’s always been obvious when there’s a major production problem. You’ll see everyone standing around a single desk; everyone working together on the same problem at the same time. If there’s a blocker to what they’re doing, one or more people in the group will immediately do something to remove that obstacle, to ensure that the main work continues uninterrupted.

Priorities

Out of the box, Jira offers up five different priorities for any given ticket, which implies five different classes of service. Since the option is there, many teams will use all of them at different times.

Secondary Gain and Work in Progress (WIP)

I think by now we all understand that having too many things in progress at once is a negative on almost all counts. We get less accomplished, our quality drops, and we generally feel more overwhelmed. Yet, we continue to start more work than we can finish, over and over again. Why might this be?

Speeding up the daily coordination meeting (AKA standup, daily scrum)

When I first engage with a team, I’m focused on ensuring that we have an effective daily meeting, and I’m less concerned about how long it takes. Are we talking about all the things that we should be talking about? Are are actively collaborating on the work?