The purpose of the Prime Directive is to assure that a retrospective has the right culture to make it a positive and result oriented event. It makes a retrospective become an effective team gathering to learn and find solutions to improve the way of working.
The prime directive should be read before a retrospective begins.
"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."
--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
(source: Retrospective Wiki)
There are two elements to retrospectives:
- Retrospective (smaller groups performing retrospectives)
- Comradrospective (whole company retrospective format)
Retrospectives should occur at least once every two weeks and should normally take 30-60 minutes but can be flexible depending on team size; for instance Academy Retrospectives have a 90 minute timebox. Comradrospectives are scheduled every 2 weeks on Friday for 60 minutes.
The purpose of retrospectives is to:
- Examine outcomes from previous retrospective, and understand what went well, and what didn’t.
- Create action points or decide on problems that the team will tackle
- Provide a conduit to allow continuous improvement to be facilitated safely within teams.
The purpose of the comradrospective is to:
- Examine previous action points, what went well and what didn’t.
- Avoid “localised optimisations” i.e. the action points of one smaller group, hurting the whole.
- Set one or two action points, or problems, for the whole company to focus on.
Remember that action points are only potential solutions to a problem. In order to aid examining your own achievements, being able to measure the impact of your action points by some form of measurable yard-stick can be quite helpful. Establishing a definition of awesome is one accepted solution to this, or some sort of hard metric can also help.
Sometimes it is not immediately obvious how to solve a problem that the team is collectively facing. In these situations it may be wise to have the team attempt to resolve a particularly pressing pain point during normal working time.
Similar to action points, it’s important that the team is able to measure and sense check whether it has made progress towards some goal.
Make sure the team has awareness on what the outcome of potential solutions would look like.
Teams are expected to self-organise into groups that make sense to perform retrospectives with.
Team members should only attend one retrospective, and then the comradrospective.
Sharing views can be difficult at times; it's important we recognise this by holding safety checks.
Safety checks should be run before both retrospectives and comradrospectives, our numbering system is outlined below.
5 - I’ll talk about anything
4 - I’ll talk about almost anything; a few things might be hard
3 - I’ll talk about some things, but others will be hard to say
2 - I’m not going to say much, I’ll let others bring up issues
1 - I’ll smile, claim everything is great and agree with authority figures
0 - I'm not comfortable talking/I don't want to do this/I want to leave
The facilitator should collect the team's safety numbers anonymously, this can be done using either the same pen and paper or digitally, and work out if safety is high or low. If it is low the facilitator should hold an exercise to raise safety and work out what might be causing low safety.
It follows the basic flow:
- Facilitator asks everyone to put themselves in the shoes of someone who might not feel safe and to note down what those causes might be
- Based on the submitted post-it notes, add a separate column where people can think of reasons that might cause these issues
- Based on the potential causes, add another column asking for people to submit potential solutions
- Read these all out and discuss with the team
- Run the safety check again
If the safety level has increased after this point, then you can run the retrospective.
Six Thinking Hats is a good discipline for everybody to get the most out of your retrospective experience.
Ensuring that everyone in the retrospective only focusses on one hat at a time, can keep the discussions aligned towards a common direction.
A common order to move through the hats is:
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Managing Blue – what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal? Can look at the big picture.
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Information White – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
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Emotions Red – intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
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Discernment Black – logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative. Practical, realistic.
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Optimistic response Yellow – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony. Sees the brighter, sunny side of situations.
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Creativity Green – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes. Thinks creatively, out of the box.
Source: Edward de Bono - Six Thinking Hats
- The first hour is booked for smaller group retrospectives
- The second hour is booked for the comradrospective
Teams are expected to self-manage which includes time boxing their retrospectives.
If you wish to perform your retrospective at a different time, or, more or less frequently. You are free to do so, so long as you have sought both agreement and input from your group.
Any improvements, changes to the comradrospective, should be discussed at the comradrospective with everyone it will affect involved.
Teams are expected to elect a facilitator for their individual retrospectives.
The facilitation role should be seen as a skill that can be improved, and facilitators should treat it as such.
The comradrospective facilitator should rotate so that everyone performs it.
The format is expected to be evolutionary, this document serves as it’s living documentation.
- Some further reading is available on the Retrospectives Wiki
- Some common retrospective ailments & cures