I will be giving a mini-workshop at Agile in the City Bristol 2018 on Retrospecting your Retrospectives.

About the conference:

Returning for its third year, Agile in the City: Bristol is a practical agile development conference that allows participants to connect and learn from their peers and leaders in the industry.

Contact me for a discount code!

Retrospecting your Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives should help teams to reflect at the end of each iteration to learn and decide what to improve and take action in the next iteration.

Valuable agile retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in the organisation. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value.

But sometimes retrospectives don’t live up to expectations. Problems that can happen are:

• the same actions keep coming up in every retrospective
• nothing happens after the meeting, actions are not done
• people are postponing or skipping the retrospective meeting
• team members complain that retrospectives are boring and a waste of time
• there’s a lack of energy in the room during the meeting; people are not engaged
• people don’t feel safe to speak up and share their views
• discussions in the retrospective are not about the real problems (elephant in the room)
• the retrospective facilitator is leading people towards a pre-defined answer/solution

In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again.

It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 18 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn.

Benefits for participants:

• learn to use exercises to reflect on your current practice of retrospectives
• see how to create a safe and productive environment to run retrospectives
• practise effective skills for facilitating retrospectives and getting people engaged

Intended audience: scrum masters, agile coaches, tech leads and anyone who facilitates retrospectives.

This session includes ideas published in my book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives and practices from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox.