Introduction to retrospectives
TeamRetro’s agile retrospective meetings provide your team the opportunity to reflect on their recent experiences and identify opportunities to improve. Retrospectives usually focus on a specific time period or event - eg. most recent development sprint or iteration or a recently completed project. It is guided by the Agile Prime Directive.
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
Retrospective meeting process
WELCOME
This step is optional.
Set the stage on the welcome screen and get people started on the right foot. Participants can see a preview of the retrospective, any information added to the retrospective set up and even a relevant or fun image.
As part of this step, you can also run an Ice breaker or Check In question to get engagement up, or to get people participating.
OPEN ACTIONS
This step is optional.
Before diving into the retrospective, you can choose to review any action items that the team agreed to do in the previous retrospective. This increases accountability, allows you to celebrate wins and address any blockers. You can also review the team agreements which helps to set the tone of the meeting. Use PRESENT mode to talk through each item in turn.
BRAINSTORM
Your team brainstorms within pre-defined topics such as What went well? What didn't go well?. Depending on your team dynamic, you can set the brainstorming activity to be fully, semi or not anonymous, and customize your own topics. Learn more
GROUP
In this step, all ideas are revealed and the team may group similar or related ideas into themes by drag and drop to create a new group. TeamRetro assists this process by applying Natural Language Processing techniques to suggest potentially related groups that you can accept or reject. Grouping can be done just by the facilitator or open to all. Learn more
VOTE
The team can then vote independently for ideas they'd like to discuss further. Votes are tallied and will be revealed when the facilitator reveals them or goes to the next step.. Learn more
DISCUSS
Starting with the top-voted ideas first; members of your team can discuss, propose and capture action items for future improvements. Team members can either review, comment, and add actions in their own time; or the facilitator can enter use PRESENT mode to guide the team conversation through each top-voted idea in turn. Learn more
Step 5 - Review
The team reviews the actions identified during the meeting and optionally assigns owners and due dates for additional accountability. This is also an opportunity to review actions from previous retrospectives or health checks and update their status. Learn more
Step 6 - Share
The meeting comes to a close and the results can be shared with your team - whether by email, PDF report, Slack, or downloaded into XLS or CSV formats. Learn more
