Getting the most out of your Sprint Retrospective
Sprint retrospectives can be fun and can take the form of a huge number of different themes from the Sailboat to Harry Potter to the Starfish. I've even created many of my own themes (Indiana Jones, Elvis Presley, A night at the movies…to name but a few) which have helped put a smile on my teams face and encouraged open conversation.
Having a fun, energizing and engaging retro is all great, but the hard part that teams often struggle with is the bit at the end — developing a kaizen.
Taking your teams pain points and crafting them into something to agree on to improve can be hard. I've witnessed many teams run great retros where the feedback and conversations are flowing freely and the scrum master is doing a great job of facilitating this. But when it comes to developing a kaizen the team struggle.
Having fun and giving kudos is great for team morale but lets not forget where the true value lies in the retro - finding something to improve.
The good news is that there are some simple steps you can take to increase your odds of ensuring your retrospectives lead to real improvements.
Selecting the right action
Teams often make the mistake of jumping from voting on a kaizen topic to agreeing on the action they will take.
The scrum master should guide the team to slow down and brainstorm all possible solutions even if they are obvious, by talking through them as a team you will ensure you give your kaizen action proper thought and that you choose the right action.
Make your kaizen specific
When crafting your kaizen its important to be specific about the actions you will take to improve something and the results you are expecting to achieve. This way when you come to the end of your next sprint you can review whether or not your kaizen was successful and if you achieved what you were intending to. There are a number of ways to do this but personally i like the SMART mnemonic.
Making sure your kaizen is focused on just the next immediate steps you can take to improve something is also a good idea, remember that this needs to be something that can be achieved within the next sprint.
Make the kaizen visible
If nobody on the team remembers where the kaizen is or its not checked in on at your daily stand ups then you cant expect to see any progress on it. There are no magic kaizen fairies that will do this for you, this is down to the scrum master to keep the team focused on the kaizen throughout the sprint. So ensure you add your kaizen to your board, discuss progress on it at your stand ups and review it at your next retrospective.
Remember the success of your retro isn’t measured when the retro is over.
Change and continuous improvement is hard work, but well worth it.
