Retrospective Ideas

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!

• My blog post on Retros

• 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

• Perfection Game

• 4L’s - Liked, Learned, Loved, Longed for

• TWiG - the WIP game

• Start/Stop/Continue (Yellow, Red, Green)

• Johari Window

• 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

• http://www.funretrospectives.com

• 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...

• https://recesskit.com

• 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____.

• https://gamessimonplays.com/

• Tetris Kanban Board

• Monopoly Kanban Board

• Pop Down Chart

• 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

• Story of a Story

• Repeat / Avoid

• 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

• Appreciation

  • • 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 Many Faces of Jack Sparrow

• • 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