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Over the years, we've collected retrospective ideas - my challenge to myself and others has always been to never use the same retro facilitation technique twice! Changing it up gets people to think differently and that's what you need in a retro. Here are a load of ideas!
Retrospective Prime Directive - a favorite way to kick off a Retro!
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.
Action items - treat them like experiments! How long to run it? How will you measure it’s success?
Create a team IDENTITY to get to outcomes that you always remind yourself of. What's the team you aspire to be? Creative? Fun? High performing? Diligent? Customer focused? Pick one, make it visible, regularly ask (at standups perhaps) if the decisions you're making are in line with that identity)
Reverse Debate - have people debate the side of the issue that they’re not on
4L’s - Liked, Learned, Loved, Longed for
Start/Stop/Continue (Yellow, Red, Green)
King for the Day
If you were king (or czar or queen), what would you change on your team?
Other sites with great retro ideas:
Retrospective random idea generator - based on the 5 stages of the Agile Retrospectives book
Trello board full of ideas
Tasty Cupcakes- great website for ideas and games
Speed Dating - great if you have a group of talkers - everyone gets to talk!
Pair people up in their date
5 min timebox to talk about what went well and what didn't - ideas go on a posits
Switch dates 1-2 more times
Posits go up to the board and then dot vote on what people want to change
Safety check - Good way to start off a retro with a new team and understand if they trust each other or not
Timeline
Put a timeline up of the sprint (or the class) - day by day
Have people add postits of everything that happened on those days
Let those milestones spark ideas of things we should be doing differently
Draw the sprint - hand the team markers and see what happens
Apples to Apples for retros - use applicable green cards and have the team make their own red cards before playing (red cards are everything they can think of that happened during the sprint). Rotate the person that plays a green card and judges the responses.
Lean Coffee Fishbowl Constellation
Use Lean Coffee to generate and vote on things that went well or didn't
Use Fishbowl technique then to put three people in seated in the middle of the room discussing/debating the Lean Coffee item. If someone runs out of things to say, they get up and someone else sits down
Constellation: everyone else on the team stands behind the person they agree with most. The closer you are to their chair, the more you agree with them
Continuums – Draw a few continuums up on the whiteboard. Have each team member dot vote where they think the team lands on each continuum. Discuss.
Manifesto Principles
Team agreement, vision
5 dysfunctions of a team
Trust (Speak your mind ßà Not voicing your opinion)
Conflict (Constructive dialog ßàAvoid like the plague)
Commitment (Do what it takes to be successful ßà(Paying lip service, being passive aggressively compliant)
Accountability (Own your mistakes/focus on solutions not problems ßà Throw people under the bus/”it’s all me attitude”)
Results (What’s in it for the team? ßàWhat’s in it for me?)
Anchors and Sails
Draw up on the board a sailboat with a sail up and and anchor down
Everyone puts posits up - posits around the sails are things that are helping us move along, posits around the anchor are things that are dragging us down
Distributed retro tools: http://lmsgoncalves.com/2014/11/14/tools-distributed-agile-retrospectives/
Team votes on MVP with some silly, fun prize (bobblehead!)
Talk through the improvement items on everyone’s performance evals and figure out how to help each other out with those
Liberating Structures
Venn diagram of build the right thing, build the thing right, build it fast (show PO in a nutshell first?)
Time lapse task board retro - take a pic of the task board every day and use the time-lapse walkthrough for the retro
Agile Cheerup (appreciations) - based on the Agile values - posits to appreciate team members on specific values
Genie in a bottle - everyone gets 3 wishes - 3 areas: yourself, the team, other teams
Team health assessment
https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/health-monitor/project-teams
Agility Health Asseessment
Agile Fluency...
Perfection game - 1-10 (how much I have ideas to improve the session - 2 means I have ideas to make this 5x better). I give it a ____. I liked ____. To move it to a 10, ideas to change____.
7 wastes - gallery walk of each waste and where it manifests in our team - https://blog.kainexus.com/improvement-disciplines/lean/7-wastes-of-lean/real-life-examples
Review a list of issues identified during past retros and dot vote to see which ones we’ll take in this time:
Sample board of compiled issues - http://www.ideaboardz.com/for/Sprint%205%20Retro/2530480
Start, Stop and Continue
WWW Activity: Worked well, kinda worked, didn’t work
I changed this idea up a little bit and made it a little more anonymous so we weren’t putting anyone in a hot seat. I just printed up pics of everyone and we passed around the pic for the team to write down the following:
You really served the team when…
What I would like to see more of…
The instructions for the retrospective activity were as follows:
think about the activities that took place in the last sprint (a 2-week sprint just ending)
reflect on how generally you felt about the sprint including what went well, what challenges there were, what we learned, etc.
we did a gallery walk and came up with as many reflections as you can, using the many pirate faces of Johnny Depp (attached pics) as inspirations for your thoughts
write down 1 reflection on each sticky note. Come up with as many reflections as you can in about 5-8 minutes
When time was up, we discussed what inspired the thought they were sharing and came up with action items
ESVP (Explorer, Vacationer, Shopper, Prisoner)
Agile Cheer Up
Genie in a Bottle
Appreciations
Hoarder
I used the following “open the box” retro idea, but changed it to being tied to a hoarder’s intervention (clean yo house)
Draw the Iteration
If you want a good laugh, try this retrospective. The team is given a set of five questions to answer in pictures rather than words. The person who draws the picture isn't allowed to explain the answer; other team members try to explain what he or she means.
Try to figure out what the team member meant by this diagram:
Super Mario Retro:
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