Let’s go on an imaginary hike for this retro — 60 min
Check-in — 10min
I always prefer to start with a check-in activity it helps the audience share or does something interesting which helps in team bonding. It is also a reminder to be present in your current environment with all the participants sharing the virtual or physical space. Since we are going hiking, it will be great if the team members share a personal hiking experience with the team.
Share a hiking story, an experience, did anything interesting happened?
You will be surprised to find out some great stories or someone on the team can actually find a new hiking partner; undiscovered trails or mind-boggling experiences. There is so much more to a person than what it appears to be.
Team members actually shared images and videos of the beautiful views. Some interesting things popped up in this short storytelling session, it is during such moments you get to experience that there is so much more to an individual than just the professional you are working along.
This check-in activity helped set the stage for the following retrospective activity.
The Hiking Retrospective — 30min — 45min
Why does having some engaging retro template help, we can simply pop up these questions and ask the team to respond.
The templates help every individual to get into the context. Imagine if we just asked the question what blocked you from reaching your goal VS adding a boulder and visually presenting that you are feeling blocked by these boulders from reaching your goal? Templates give perspective and set the stage for the discussion.
Similarly, if we ask the participants about the weather and how did it make them feel, how was the environment? The question makes them relate to the external conditions and how they made them feel.
Example: Someone said it felt like hailstones, something continuously falling from the sky. Demonstrating too many requests flowing in during the sprint causing disturbances.
The hiking retrospective template concentrates on 4 questions.
The weather — Represents how was teams work environment, and how did it make them feel. Consider the hailstones example mentioned above.
The boulders — Represent the things that blocked you from achieving your goal. This can be like inter-team dependencies, technical challenges, mid-sprint changing priorities, or communication barriers.
The equipment — These are things that helped you during hiking to reach your goal. You can talk about people, events, tools anything that supported you in the journey.
The missing stuff — These are things that were not there and having them in place could have made it better or more fun. Hypothetical examples can be a missing map, binoculars, great food, campfire, toilets, etc. A relatable real example could be minimum stories getting rolled over, quick MR’s approvals, collaborative colleagues, and great inter-team communication.
Missing factors are the areas for improvement.
During these discussions, my personal opinion is that there are quite a few topics that surface and it is difficult to come to a conclusion about specific topics that the team wants to address immediately and devise a plan to do so. Leaving the conversation here seems to be a job half done. Drawing a unanimous conclusion aligns the team and helps them focus on specific improvements, narrowing down to what needs to be done to address the topic.
Voting and coming up with action items — 10min
My preferred option is voting. I ask the team members to vote, which helps to see how the team feels. Which topics get most of the votes followed by the question, what can the team do to improve with respect to the selected topic? Depending on the type of issue, assigning owners can be helpful, or explicitly highlighting that the entire team is accountable for this improvement to set expectations.
Outcome
While facilitating this Retrospective the team came up with a single issue to focus on and derived action items for improvement. Even if voting is my preferred way it was not needed. The highlighted issue was, “stories lacked clear scope”, they wanted to address it during refinements. The team took ownership and admitted that down the line they had stopped using mindmaps during refinement. Mindmaps helped them with defining scope, sizing, and structured way of representing the information.
The template looks great if you are facilitating the digital retro don’t try to kill yourself by drawing this piece of art on the whiteboard with markers. Stick figures and basic mountains work absolutely fine.
Comments