Usually, a team's retrospective appointments are booked well in advance. For example, in my teams we try to have our recurring team retrospectives once every four weeks. The meeting is timeboxed to between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on team size.
But sometimes it feels much too rigid having to wait for many weeks between retrospectives - you ideally want that feedback loop start flowing with learnings right away! Therefore, some of my teams have started to do ad-hoc retrospectives when we feel the need for it, for example after a chaotic deployment or if there is a conflict within the team.
As the retrospectives are ad-hoc, we just go find a room and get started. Keep it swift, go around the table and discuss what went well and what didn’t. Try to find root causes for problems - 5 Whys is an excellent tool for that. Make immediate adjustments or commit to experiments (Not too many, preferably just a single one!) that might solve the problems. Then get back to work.
The implementation of Continuous retrospective makes the team-process feedback loop run continuously instead of delivering learnings in big batches. Also, problems get addressed faster which means that they won’t have as much time to grow!
Inspect and adapt, continuously!
Inspect and adapt, continuously!
In my opinion continuous retrospection requires very high maturity in the team, it can not be done with all teams
ReplyDeleteThis process of reactive retros are supported more in the Kanban space but works well in any environment where there is a need to evalute and regroup.
ReplyDeleteA 4 week retro is in my opinion far too long to wait for team inspection and adaption hence why you require more reactive retros