Why do we keep making the same mistakes? The importance of the retrospective

We get it, time is precious, even more so when tight deadlines need to be met, a LIVE incident needs to be resolved or a new product feature need to be launched. However, what if there was a method of identifying what you are truly doing well and where you can make improvements to make you even better?

Welcome to the most undervalued ceremony of them all...the retrospective! We are big believers that in order to drive a cycle of continuous improvement, retrospectives are a great enabling tool in achieving this objective.

Here are some of our top tips when it comes to facilitating an effective retrospective:

1) Identify who should be mandatory attendees for your retrospective, this will most commonly be the core project team and any stakeholders who are integral to the project/deliverable that was progressed during the previous sprint(s) - additional stakeholders can be added to specific retrospective meetings as and when required

2) Ensure that retrospective meetings are scheduled in calendars so they are visible and stakeholders have adequate time to prepare; ideally retrospectives should be held at the end of each sprint cycle and have clear objectives and expected outcomes included within the content of the invite so there are no surprises

3) It is vitally important to communicate to stakeholders the value of holding retrospectives and how this will contribute to the cycle of continuous improvement - you want their buy-in so they actively contribute to the retrospectives and do not, in a worst case scenario, become a disruptor to what you are trying to achieve

4) If possible, undertake as much preparation prior to the retrospective meeting in order to maximise the time available - creating a template in a shared workspace (e.g. MIRO, MS Whiteboard) is a great starting point. As a subsequent action, ask participants to add their feedback into the document prior to the meeting, ensuring they add their name/initials so there is an audit trail of who has provided what feedback

5) Prior to the retrospective meeting, aim to review the feedback provided so far and group these into common themes - it will save valuable time during the meeting and allow participants to focus their attention on the all important actions that will feed the cycle of continuous improvement

6) In respect to the actual retrospective meeting itself, it is imperative that the agenda is timeboxed and adequately governed. As an example, we would suggest the following agenda and allocated time structure (based on a 1 hour meeting):

a) Review of previous retrospective actions, if applicable (10mins)

b) Review of feedback provided so far and an opportunity to add new items (10mins)

c) Group the feedback into themes and prioritise (10mins)

Note: we adopt the 'three spot' method for prioritisation, namely that each participant gets three spots to assign in any way to each of the themes generated based upon their interpretation of it's priority i.e. a participant could assign their three spots to one theme or three spots to three separate themes

d) Creation of action & owners for priority themes (25mins)

e) Recap & Next Steps (5mins)

7) The actions that have been generated must be available to participants and regularly reviewed in respect to their ongoing status - we have previously adopted a method of creating a separate 'sprint' within the product backlog that holds the Retrospective actions and have an extended daily stand-up once a week to discuss these

The benefits that teams get from retrospectives is entirely driven by the effort that is put in and the value they place on these type of ceremonies, however the points above hopefully provide some ideas on how to get the most out of any retrospective and feeds your own cycle of continuous improvement.

Thanks for reading