Engaging Retrospectives

There is a say: "Scrum is Simple but Not Easy". Especially when working with a team during a longer period of time there comes the 'Engaging' retrospectives challenge. 

Speaking about sprint retrospectives, we all know how important those are. We are in an empirical process where we want teams to become better and better. They can be a place for building and enabling teams, a place for learning, problem solving, having fun and motivating each other.

After a while, when the team is used to the same retrospective format, might become a challenge for Scrum Master to facilitate the sprint retrospective in a way to engage all team members.

My question is How do you make your retrospectives engaging?

I realized that keeping the same classic retrospective format does not help me - the old way of answering what went well and what can be improved, leads to boredom and routine.

And so, soon I found out that Diversity is the key

I started to document myself what can I do to improve engagement level during retrospectives. And I discovered that's important to:

1. Structure your retrospective & switch the format
I found the Agile Retrospective - Making Good Teams Great book of Esther Derby and Diane Lersen
and I started to structure my retros as:
  • Set the Stage
  • Gather Date
  • Generate Insights
  • Decide what to do
  • Closing

Each stage can be facilitated using different activities. The book offers multiple ideas that can be practiced.
Besides what's recommended by the book, I discovered also funretrospectives.com which inspired me a lot.

I quickly noticed how much this can change the atmosphere and team members engaging levels. 
But worth to mention that you have to be careful when choosing the activity to be related with what happened during the sprint so that there is correlation.

Using Gamification and Changing the room or the retrospective location helps too.

2. Pay attention to Action Items
Another important aspect for a valuable retrospective are the action items. A retro without actions might become a complaining session and we don't want that. 
We want to see progress towards efficiency and we want teams which take responsibility over action which can help to team efficiency.

3. Improve you facilitation skills
Even if you have a good structure sometimes there is something missing from a facilitation perspective. Maybe you need to improve you soft skills - facilitation skills
What helped me is Sam's Kener book Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making . I discovered good practices and concrete samples that can help in any facilitation situation.

4. Ask for feedback
In closing, please consider the above and do an experiment with your team of trying something new.

And ask team feedback after each retro, afterwards how will you know how your sprint retrospective was? Based on feedback see what works for you team and start to diverse the retrospective format to get out the best of it.

I do recommend you to take a look over the above ideas as it might be very helpful to add diversity when facilitation sprint retrospectives.

What's you secret in engaging retrospectives?






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