So, I’m still trying to figure out what I think is important to write about, I thought it’d be cool to write “How To’s”, It doesn’t mean by any chance, that my way is the right way (or even close to it), but it’s how I do things and I thought it’d be cool to write technically how to do things (I know I googled a lot of those questions in the beginning).

 

Retrospective (~1 hour)

How it works:

 

Likes (Or better yet, “what is the wind in our sails?”)

We are starting our meeting with 5 minutes to write things we liked during our Sprint, we used “I… “ language – for example: “I like when…” and we agree to name names or to cast blame, but to tell how “I” felt when something happened to me…

 

After the 5 minutes, each person goes to the board in his/hers turn and presents what we liked on a board

 

After we all said what we liked and put it on the board, all of us stand up and cluster our likes, we give each cluster a name (or common grounds title).

 

This is a good time celebrate our accomplishments and understand what we are doing well as a group.

 

To Improve (Or, “What anchors us?”):

After grouping the things we did well it was time to reflect on what was anchoring us down and what we can improve moving forward.

 

We take 5 minutes yet again and write what we did not like / wanted to improve, again using “i” language and describing how we feel without naming names/casting blames – after those 5 minutes we go to the board again (one at a time), read our cards out loud, explain a bit and after that we group those items as well together and give them a name.

 

Action Items (Small steps we would try to take during this Sprint, so we could improve/try new things)

After we group our “To Improve”, we will vote on the board by putting dots on the clusters and try and create 3-4 action items we want to tackle for the next iteration.

 

At the start of each iteration, we will ask how did the action items work for us

• Do we want to integrate the action item in our process?
• Do we want to drop it? (Why wasn’t it working?)
• Do we want to try the same action items for another iteration (if yes, we drag it to the current iteration action items list)

 

So we chose to go and tackle things in small incremental changes and to try and take a small step forward and asses if it worked next time we meet.

 

The idea is, small steps are easily reversible so no harm is done if they don’t work, but if they do work, we can easily build on them and progress in that direction – no overhauls! But seeing the process naturally, progress in time (and adapt itself to new team members as well).