Living Eulogy – Agile Retrospectives

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by Jessica Long

Agile Retrospective Activity

The most unfortunate thing about a traditional eulogy is that the subject of gratitude isn’t around to hear it. An agile sprint is a lot like life overall in the sense that it’s over before you know it. Don’t wait for a moment to become a memory. Capture it. The Living Eulogy Retrospective is one of the more uplifting and unforgettable exercises that I have had the pleasure of driving. If there were ever a way to humanize a team’s DNA and build upon a bond, this is a surefire way to do it.

What you can expect to get out of this exercise

Focus will be diverted away from the traditional accounting side and reflection of the iteration. Concentrating on the people instead of the process humanizes an otherwise methodical system oriented examination. This will result in improved team harmony and synchronization. The exercise is beneficial for both maturing teams and groups that may be struggling with internal team level conflict.

How to do it

Hand each teammate a sheet of a paper as you introduce the exercise. Instruct each person to put pen to paper and identify who they are and what team they represent on the top of the page. For example, “Jess Long is a teammate for the Ginger Snaps.” Explain that upon your mark, each person should hand their paper to the left. The receiver will have 2 minutes to write an expression of gratitude or describe a positive team contribution that praises the subject at an individual level. This can be a single sentence or a short paragraph. Upon hearing the buzzer at the 2 minute interval, the teammate should hand the paper to the person on their left. This action will repeat itself until the papers make their way back to their original subject.

When you receive the sheet belonging to the person to your right, this will indicate that you’ve reached the final round. Urge the final writers to hand the papers back to their owners face down upon hearing the buzzer. Once everyone has received their original sheet, it’s time to ask for a volunteer to read his or her living eulogy to the group. Most participants are eager to see the mysterious sheet that lies before them but if there’s hesitation, you can opt to go first. This is the fun part. As the paper is flipped and the summaries are read out loud, there can be a lot of laughter around subpar penmanship and sometimes even tears of endearment.

Once everyone has had a chance to read, thank the group for extending themselves in such a personal manner. Reflect on the experience and express that you hope each person values their living eulogy as much as you value your own. Urge your teammates to hang these up or keep them in a place they can easily access. Chances are, that is already the intent of your team before you even suggest it.

About Jess

Jess Long has driven multiple Agile Transformations within several large financial institutions. Her love of coaching has enabled her to be a servant leader to many teams and provide individual direction to each of the specific roles that make up a successful Agile alliance. While she values each ceremony that goes along with an iteration, she embraces the sprint retrospective most of all.

If you have questions related to this article, please feel free to contact Jess on Twitter @ScrumAndGinger or through Scrumandginger.com

Picture credits go to: Improve It.

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In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives OIKOSOFY has prepared 10 Days FREE AGILE RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM for you. This is a complete self-study program where you will learn anything that you need to become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

If you are interested in sharing your Agile Retrospective exercise with us on the format of Guest Blogging please contact us: info@oikosofy.com.

The Twitterspective – agile retrospective

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by Anthony Petrucci

What is the Twitterspective?

Why hold an Agile Retrospective when you can have a Twitterspective? The Twitterspective is a paper-based
social media-like simulation that can be used to gather data and generate insight from the team in your
Retrospective. It borrows elements from a few different social media channels and blends them into
one. Given the popularity of social media, this is a fun way to engage with the team through a familiar
medium.

What can you expect to get out of this exercise?

Expect to see some smiles or hear people giggling as you explain to your team that they will be participating in a social media simulation on paper. In this exercise, everyone has a voice and will have their opinions acknowledged by their team mates. Once the Twitterspective Feed begins to light up (with post-it notes of course), they can see how their peers are reacting to each post in real time.

When would you use this exercise?

Use this exercise after your warm-up activity. This may be a good change for your team if your recent Retrospectives have been more traditional. It gives a good opportunity to both shy and outgoing team members to be heard.

How to do it

Screen Shot 2015-10-05 at 9.20.56 AM

1. Prepare post-its for each participant

2. Make sure you have a whiteboard, window, or a wall space that is large enough to accommodate a row of Post-its. This will act as your ‘Twitterspective Feed’

3. Ask the group: “If you were to express your opinion on a social media channel about the last Sprint (or any predetermined topic) what would you say?”

4. Allow 4 – 7 minutes of silent writing and encourage the team to include hashtags about their overall sentiment or perhaps a clever meme.

twitterspective4

5.  Have the team post their Tweets on the Twitterspective feed.

twitterspective5

 

6.  As a facilitator, you will read each post-it, one at a time, and have each participant to: 1) comment on the post-it 2) ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the post. Give the team 2 minutes to write their comment. Please note – the author of the post DOES NOT comment or like/dislike his own post.

7. As a team, go through each post along with its associated comments. Take the conversation a little deeper whenever necessary. This conversation should not be longer than 40 minutes.

twitterspective6

8. Through your discussion, there should be some takeaways identified. Gather the team’s ideas and keep track of the takeaways.

9. After the Twitterspective, send a summary email to the team displaying each of the posts as well as how many likes/dislikes there were.

Timeline

  • Explanation/Introduction (1-3 minutes)
  • Participants write Tweets (4-7 minutes)
  • Tweet and comment evaluation/discussion (30– 40 minutes; only allow 1-2 minutes to writeeach comment)
  • Conclusion – Identify and gather takeaways (5 minutes)

Anthony Petrucci is a Scrum Master, Kanban Lead, former Product Owner, and Agile Enthusiast. For comments, questions, or feedback, please contact Anthony on Twitter @AgileSauce.

Picture credits go to: Anthony Petrucci and Alan Stanton

In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives I am at the moment preparing a 10 DAYS FREE AGILE RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM. This is a complete self-study program where you will learn anything that you need to become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

If you are interested in sharing your Agile Retrospective exercise with us please contact us: info@oikosofy.com.

Happiness Index – agile retrospective tool

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by Luis Goncalves

No matter how good teams are, there is always an opportunity to improve. Happiness Index is an agile retrospectives tool, which measures happiness of agile teams. Luis shares it in his and Ben Linder´s  book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.

This exercise is a combination of “Develop a time line” and “Emotions Seismograph” from Norman L. Kerth.

What can you expect to get out of this technique

The goal of this exercise is to have a graphic representation of team members´emotions during sprints. This kind of information helps the team to identify what affects its performance during the spring. Whatever problem the team goes through, this exercise helps them to reveal team emotions right in the place.

When you would use this technique

It is certainly suitable for a team that goes through many different emotions (positive or negative) within the sprint. It benefits them when they wish to evaluate the consequences or when the team has several challenges within the spring and would like to understand how these issues appeared.

Happiness Index is suitable for any team, it does not require any specific level of maturity. The exercise can be applied to both remote and collocated teams.

How to do it

Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 6.12.52 PMTake a A4 white paper and some post-its. Divide the paper in 2 parts/axis – positive and negative. Then divide the X axis in the number of sprint days.

There are 2 ways of doing this exercise:

1) The exercise is done during the retrospective with whole team
2) The exercise is done in small pieces during the sprint

Option 1: Create small groups of 2-3 people. Ask them to do a brainstorming session on events or situations that occurred during last sprint. After, ask the group to create a graphic showing emotion levels with the situations they brainstormed. When all groups are done, create a representation of all groups in a single graphic. Do not forget to put an explanation of each different emotion.

Option 2: Instead of a team drawing the emotion graphic, you should let each individual to draw his own emotion level at the end of each work day. This approach will make sure that all events or situations are covered and are not forgotten.

Both options work well! You will have a great picture of what happened during the sprint. This information helps a retrospective facilitator to identify situations that should be repeated and events that cause the problems or delay in the team. However, you can use root cause analyses techniques to identify the root problems.

In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives I am at the moment preparing a 10 DAYS FREE AGILE RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM. This is a complete self-study program where you will learn anything that you need to become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

If you are interested in sharing your Agile Retrospective exercise with us please contact us: info@oikosofy.com.

Imagine a Failure: a pre-mortem retrospective

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by Nikos Batsios

Conducting a Post-Mortem at the end of your project is a great lesson learned practice that could promote the recurrence of desirable outcomes while preventing from the undesirable outcomes!

It’s true that we – our teams, processes and organisations benefit from post-mortems, except our project! As the psychologist Gary Klein said: “A postmortem is a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patients’ death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient.”

Instead of conducting a postmortem and looking back on what happened in your project you can try a pre-mortem just at the beginning of your project and imagine that it was an absolute failure! (alternatively think of success)

What you can expect to get out of this exercise

Creativity and openness from all team members to express their concerns in a safe environment when their project is still in the planning phase! Teams can get ideas and actions on areas that if implemented well could increase the chances of success!

How to do it

Creating the “script”

Before starting your pre-mortem, it is really important to illustrate an imaginary failed state, a disaster,  of the project that is about to start. Adding details, using pictures and creating a “script” or a story could help the team to actually be part of this unwanted state! It can be, for example, an “aggressive” email that your team received from a customer’s CEO describing the frustration with the project delivery trigger and he needs your immediate support to resolve all these problems!

Why this has happened? – 30 minutes

After discussing this project imaginary failure story ,  all team members brainstorm possible causes that triggered this disaster!

  • Use sticky notes to gather all the causes and discuss them
  • Group them into common themes and
  • Prioritize the themes based on their importance and their contribution to that failure

How to prevent this imaginary failure? – 30 minutes

Discuss the themes and the identified causes. Ask team members to brainstorm and find possible solutions that will prevent the identified causes from happening in reality. The outcome should be a list of concrete actions that team members should take care of by themselves or delegate these to people who could best support them.

The team can decide to work on a few or all themes depending on the their availability, time and the importance of causes. The team can also follow-up on the actions or discuss more themes in their retrospectives at the end of each development cycle.

Keep Calm and carry on! – 5 minutes

You can close the pre-mortem with a relaxed message all participants! At the end, it was just a simulation and all participants gave their best to prevent this disaster from happening in real life! And the good thing is that you have a list of actions that might increase the chances of success! (in case this would really happen in the future)

About Nikos

Nikos Batsios´ main belief is that great teams could achieve astonishing results! Keeping that belief in mind, contributing in the quality environment creation, human relationships that will further unleash the potential of individuals, will enable teams to perform high and cooperate with one another towards the same organisation’s purpose. As an Agile Coach, I contributing towards that direction supporting and training teams and organisations to understand the importance of agile values, principles, practices and helping them see the benefits in their agile transformation.

If you have questions related to this article, please feel free to contact Nikos on Twitter @nbatsios.

Picture credits go to: Jeff Djevdet

In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives I am at the moment preparing a 10 DAYS FREE AGILE RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM. This is a complete self-study program where you will learn anything that you need to become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

If you are interested in sharing your Agile Retrospective exercise with us please contact us: info@oikosofy.com.