The Leanpub bundle Agile Retrospectives offers great books to do amazing Agile Retrospectives. Together these books will make your Agile retrospectives rock! Teams will love to do them :-) And now you can get these books with a significant discount :-).
I sometimes hear of teams that have stopped doing retrospectives because they didn't see any improvements. When I talk with them it often turns out that they didn't have good actions coming out of the retrospectives, or that the actions weren't done and kept coming back in the retrospective. No actions leads to no improvement. Here are some suggestions on what you can do to assure that you will have actions from retrospectives that are doable and that those actions get done.
The retrospective prime directive is a sentence that is used by facilitators to establish safety in a retrospective meeting. Safety is crucial if you want people to speak up and be open, which is an important precondition to reflect and learn which is what agile retrospectives are all about. Since our book is being translated into many languages we now have translations of this unique and important statement.
I gave a well received keynote at the QCon Beijing conference, in which I explained why continuous improvement is essential to deliver value with agile. QCon Beijing was the largest QCon conference so far with over 1600 attendants.
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.
Agile definitely needs coaching. But the way that people are coached can make a huge difference, it can be done more effectively with part-time coaching. It’s not about the coaches, it’s coaching and the coachees that matters!
Here's a story of a team that had a serious problem which it didn't recognize at first. The story shows that sometimes doing nothing can be the best thing that you can do to implement lasting change in organizations.
Many agile teams are doing retrospectives at the end of their iterations to reflect on their way of working and find things that can be improved. But what if teams are starting up and trying to figure out how to do their work? A futurespective exercise can help teams teams to find ways to reach their goals, agree upon their way of working and define a Definition of Done.
2014 was a great year for me. I've helped organization to effectively deploy Agile and Lean and improve their ways of working, my first book became a bestseller and I've inspired professionals all around the world by sharing useful knowledge and experience on my blog and via InfoQ. Let's reflect on what 2014 has brought and do a futurespective to visualize the opportunities of 2015.
When you are working with an agile team where people are not co-located you still want to do valuable agile retrospectives. As gathering everybody in one location for the retrospective is not feasible, you need to take a different approach. The dispersed team questions retrospective exercise is a variant of the questions-based retrospective for teams consisting of members working from different locations, for example team members working from home or working in different offices, countries or even continents.
Retrospective is a special time dedicated to analyse the strength and weakness of the teamwork process. There is already some well known tools used to animate this meeting and we tend to use often the same kind of exercise, which can lead to demotivation among the team members and to the feeling of not being able to improve anything anymore. We need to go back to the initial goal of the retrospective : getting better together, by using the collective intelligence and by ensuring the involvement of every team member as much in the creative process as in its application.