Scrum received some criticism today in Computer Sweden. The article featured an interview of Ken Schwaber and our guy Henrik Kniberg. Tobias Fors from Citerus was giving the comment that Scrum lacked support for retrospective. I am not sure if he was quoted correctly.

I am in the belief that Scrum has three roles, three artefacts and three meetings. Of the latter, there is one you should never skip.

The thing is, if you wish to get any better, you need to start thinking about what you do. If you do not do that, you will just muddle on like before. You probably reflect on your own ways, once in a while, as an individual, but you also need to do that as a group.

The only meeting you should never skip is the retrospective. Yet that is what seems to be happening very often, from what I hear and from the feature I mentioned.

As long as you do retrospective meetings, you can improve. You probably find that planning is also a good thing to do. But if you skipped retrospective and did planning only, you would not have a time to discuss how planning could improve. Except during your coffee break when everyone lets out their frustration anyway.

So how do you do a good retrospective meeting? There are many ways to go about, I’m sure, but let me give you a simple one that I even tried at home on a Sunday.

Divide a board in “good”and “not so good”. Hand out post-it notices and pens to everyone. Let everyone write down anything that springs to their minds when thinking about the last sprint (or last month, if you’re not iterative yet).

As they write down their thoughts, for each note, they place them on the board and states shortly what it is about. Try to refrain from discussion, is there any disagreement, just note that fact.

After a ten minutes, or when all are content, look through the notes and see if they some should be considered duplicates. If so, put them next to each other.

Now each participant is given 3 votes to put on the notes they feel is most important. All votes may be spent on one note or spread on more.

Count the votes and focus a discussion on the top five notes. Make a list of improvements from that and put on the wall visible to all.

If you coach a scrum team but you’re not around to observe them during the sprint, how do you know how they felt about it?

Ask them.

You can interview them individually or as a group. Both approaches have their problems and limitations. Individual interviews take a lot of time, and sometimes you can’t share the results without breaking confidence. If you ask them as a group you usually only get answers from the most outspoken people because:

It’s hard to talk about your feelings among strangers.

One of the teams I coach had mixed feelings about Scrum. Some were healthily skeptical, and some positive. The first sprint went very well, with a good sprint planning, a lot of initial energy and a demo that actually showed customer value. But I felt that some of the team members were not too sure how the others felt about the whole thing. I wanted to help them with that and also get some feedback myself (I admit I was a bit nervous about not being around).

I used Emo-lines.*

Here’s how you do it. First draw a time-line representing the whole sprint and ask everyone to put up notes, marking memorable or unusual events. The team’s looked something like this:

Then you prepare for the Emo-lines, start by drawing a line directly underneath the time-line. The line represents neutral feelings, with feeling good above, and feeling bad below:

Next, have each person draw how they felt during the spring using different colored markers, starting at the sprint planning and ending with the sprint demo. Here’s a simplified version of the team’s chart:

The team members’ feelings varied greatly, you can see from the chart that the sprint demo went well though because everyone felt pretty good at the end.

The next step is to ask each person to comment on his/her line. Here’s what the team said:

Mr Green – a skeptic at first.

Mr Green is a very influential person in the group and the architect, he was the first to go. He said that he was a bit skeptical at first (as everyone had noticed during the scrum training right before the sprint started). He was worried that sitting and working in a team room would interfere too much with his flow and his privacy. As the sprint went on, he came to appreciate how quick and easy communication was with the new setup and realized that it was rather fun working that way. And when the first demo went well, well…

Mr Blue – a scrum advocate who got lonely.

Mr Blue was one of the driving forces in introducing Scrum to the company and the only one who was a certified scrum master. So I was a bit surprised and worried that he had such a dip after the first week. As it turns out, during the second week he had to work from home because his kids were sick, so he felt isolated and unproductive.

Mr Orange – an enthusiast both when skeptical and when not.

Mr Orange was also one of the skeptical-at-first but enthusiastically so. At the beginning of the sprint he felt that it was fun and that it worked for him. The problem was that they actually completed the whole sprint backlog mid-sprint and he thought that was boring and unproductive. As soon that they got some extra work from the product owner he was happy again.

Are Emo-lines useful?

The team thinks so, and they decided to use them at the next retrospective. The second time they got even more out of the chart, each line showed more variation and the explanations were more detailed.

They are also valuable to me as a coach. Even when I am not with the team during the sprint I get detailed feedback about how the team feels at the end of each sprint.

I also noticed more than one surprised look on the other team members’ faces when Mr Green talked about his line, and I think some team building took place.

Here’s a picture of the whiteboard:

*If someone has another name for these, please let me know, I heard about them from my colleague David Barnholdt, and he didn’t have a name either.

Emo, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo

When we develop using agile principles we have learned to "do the simplest thing that can possibly work". What happens if we apply this thought to agile methodology itself?

What is the minimum number of principles and processes that we need, to be able to benefit from agile? Finding them should help us know what to focus on when introducing and using agile methods.

In my experience the three most important components in a successful application of agile methods are:

• Joy
• WIP limit
• Regular retrospectives

Joy

When striving for high productivity and a sustainable pace, I have found that joy is the key factor. It’s simply not possible to work really really hard for a long time if you don’t enjoy what you do. In addition, things that make the workplace and the work situation more productive also improve the mood of the team. It’s a positive spiral, people like the feeling of being productive and if you have fun it’s easier to become more productive.

So, sometimes when to choosing which way to go if you want to improve productivity, look at the joy factor too. Things that work in favor of a joyful workplace are for example: high spirits, control over your own work situation, recognition, trust, humbleness,…

WIP limit

Nothing in my experience can increase a team’s focus more than limiting the amount of work in progress (WIP). A natural reaction when a team feels pressed for time is to start working on more tasks. Probably it feels more productive to do something else if you for some reason are blocked, but it has the opposite effect since you start more work that you might be able to finish and thus wasting man hours.

With a WIP limit you are forced to address the issues that prevent you from finishing tasks, because you are simply not allowed to start a new task until the present one is finished if you have reached the WIP limit. This reveals obstacles faster and focuses on fixing them before moving on.

In my current team, we would never have automated so many tests unless we had reached the WIP limit and found that testing was the bottle neck that prevented us from starting new development tasks. The immediate solution was to have the entire team dig in and do testing, but soon some developers (who hated testing) decided to automate as many tests as possible to remove the bottle neck so that they could go back to coding. The testers found this to be very helpful, since they were so busy testing that they never found the time to automate the tests…

Regular retrospectives

Inspect and adapt. Without the possibility to change the work process itself, improvement isn’t possible. Since we never get things right the first time (we continuously learn things we didn’t know before) and the world keeps changing, we need to regularly evaluate our way of working. Can we change something to increase productivity, joy, focus?

Again, I have seen teams pressed for time going the wrong way, skipping retrospectives in order to save time (why put the whole team in a room discussing things when we already know what we have to do – deliver code?). But skipping retrospectives means cementing the way you work and you may never get out of the trouble you’re in.

I have just, as a guest blogger, posted a new post at the blog owned by the development team at TV4 Digital Media; “Några övningar vi gjort under retrospektiven”. It´s a post, in swedish, describing a few retrospective exercises we have done during the last sprints.

I’m contracted by TV4 Digial Media as an Agile coach to help them improve the collaboration, both in the development team as well as between them and the business side. It is very fun that they let my write a post as a guest blogger

I had taken on to facilitate a retrospective for my colleagues’ team. They wanted a different retrospective than the usual. So we borrowed Crisp’s office and used Jimmy Cards!

The group was around 15 persons from two teams. They all knew each other well which I believe is crucial as the questions on the cards can be challenging.

In this post I’ll give you the recipe which Jimmy and I came up with for this particular retrospective.

Divide the participants in groups of size about 5 persons. Each group sits together at a table. I like to name groups after Formula 1 teams, but that is not essential.

The retrospective has two phases:

1. Throwing questions at each other and coming up with improvement themes.
2. Discussing selected themes, current situation and definition of awesome.

Give each group a number of cards to choose from. This day, I gave them 7 each.

The first phase has several rounds where one round is like this:

1. A group selects a card with a question they like to hear the answer to.
2. The group selects another group that are asked the question.
3. The group that got the question tries to come up with as many answers as possible. They are discussing out loud and the other groups are expected to listen carefully.
4. All groups now writes down a theme of improvement. Here it is important to facilitate as it is easy to start discussing the theme instead of getting it on paper.
5. The groups presents their themes and sticks them on the wall.

New round. You can do as many as you please. Each round will give you as many themes as there are groups. In this case, we used 3 rounds for 3 groups, giving 10 themes (a bonus theme as well).

Enter the second phase. First the participants vote on the themes and the winners are picked out. We had three themes that stood out in popularity so it was natural to pick the top three.

Now, the themes are given a table each (or spot in the room) and the participants are asked to self-organise from the constraints so that there will be:

1. Enough people at each theme.
2. Mixed opinions at each theme.

Each theme is discussed and the answers to the following is sought:
1. Where are we now?
2. What is the definition of awesome for this? Here we wish to stretch our mind to something that might not even be possible.
3. What would be 5 examples of concrete steps that we could do now, that would head in the direction of awesome?

Round off with presentations.

The feedback from this occasion were very positive, “the best retrospective in years”.

Retrospective is the only meeting that you can’t skip, as I have said before so take care of it.

Nyligen så hjälpte jag till med att planera och facilitera en affärsplanering hos en kund. Då jag tycker både utfallet och genomförandet var väldigt bra så kommer här en beskrivning av vad vi gjorde och de olika övningar vi hade. Det var en relativt stor grupp som samlats föra att genomföra den årliga affärsplaneringen, vilket syftade till att utifrån företagets övergripande mål finna vad denna avdelning skall göra under året som kommer. Alla som varit med på dessa tillställningar vet att de kan vara rätt tunga och inte alltid kopplade till medarbetarnas vardag. Jag känner dock att detta tillfälle bröt traditionen, mycket på grund av att de aktuella cheferna fokuserade på att jobba kring det positiva och möjligheter i stället för problem och hinder.

Det var en grupp på 30 personer fördelade i två olika linjegrupper, och huvudmålet var att finna förändringsåtgärder för året som kommer. På vägen mot det målet, en väg som var lika viktig som slutmålet i sig, jobbade gruppen kring sin historia, arbetade fram en mission och sedan en framtidsbild om var de vill vara fem år framåt i tiden.

Jag var med under förberedelserna av denna dag och faciliterade själv eftermiddagspasset. Henrik och Helen, de två gruppcheferna faciliterade förmiddagen under arbetet med historien och missionen.

I en kommande post kommer jag att berätta lite kring Appreciative Inquiry, en förändringsprocess baserad på positiv psykologi, och hur den väl passar ihop med en systematisk förändringsprocess som Toyota Kata. Även om denna workshop inte var renlärig någon av dessa processer, hade jag dem i bakhuvudet under planeringen och mycket av dess tankar återkommer i de olika övningarna. Denna post är dock mer en händelserapport av denna aktuella workshop.

Upplägg

Agendan för dagen var:

• Arbeta fram en tidslinje från första persons anställning till idag (från 1970 framåt)
• Arbeta fram en mission för avdelningen
• Etablera en visionsbild fem år framåt
• Definiera målbilder där avdelningen skall vara om ett år
• Definiera åtgärder som skall genomföras under året för att nå målbilderna

Vi hade ett stort konferensrum till vårt förfogande samt ett antal mindre rum där grupparbeten genomfördes. Tyvärr var borden fasta så det gick inte att skapa gruppmöblering i det stora rummet. I övningar som detta är det bra att ha alla samlade i samma rum under hela tillställningen. Det är då lättare att växla mellan grupparbete och korta presentationer. Under grupparbete så divigerar grupperna tankemässigt från varandra, vilket är bra. Det är dock viktigt att konvergera frekvent, vilket händer då man får lyssna och se vad övriga grupper gör. I och med att grupperna var utspridda under gruppövningarna så minskade vi därmed frekvensen av presentationer då vi annars skulle spenderat för stor del att förflytta oss mellan rummen.

Tidslinjen

Att arbeta fram en tidslinje över en period bakåt är en vanlig övning att börja med under retrospektiv. Övningen hjälper en grupp att komma ihåg vad som har hänt under den tid som man skall reflektera över. Den hjälper gruppen att komma ihåg signifikanta händelser och därmed kunna länka dem till det resultat man skapade tillsammans. Tidslinjen kan med fördel användas till att synliggöra andra aspekter också. Jag har tidigare använt den under en team uppstart där varje teammedlem fick berätta sin historia 10 år bakåt. I denna workshop fick medarbetarna berätta hela avdelningens historia från det att den bildades på 70-talet till idag.

Tidslinje från första anställning till idag

Gruppen delades in i 6 grupper baserat på år på banken. Dessa fick sedan tillsammans identifiera signifikanta händelser under åren från deras anställning började till idag. De jobbade kring både positiva händelser och negativa händelser. Varje grupp presenterade sedan sina lappar och placerade ut dem på tidslinjen där de positiva placerades över linjen och de negative under. Bilden ovan visar resultatet där gröna och orange lappar visar olika händelser.

Efter alla grupper presenterat hjälpte Henrik gruppen att finna lärdomar som går att dra från historien. Dessa lärdomar skrevs ner på rosa lappar och sattes upp på tidslinjen.

Detta är en väldigt bra övning som ger en samsyn kring den gemensamma historien, och som ofta ger en stolthet och positiv energi för det fortsatta arbetet. Det är ofta så att det är mest positiva saker som kommer fram; vi har en naturlig tendens att komma ihåg och fokusera på det positiva när vi tillsammans tänker tillbaka på vår historia. En miss som vi gjorde under denna del var att inte vara konsekvent med färgerna på postit lapparna. Tidslinjen blir kraftfullare visuellt om varje färg representerar någon typ av information. I detta faller borde vi haft enbart gröna lappar för händelser och sedan rosa lappar för lärdomar.

Det går att basera en hel retrospektiv på bara denna övning, där man kan jobba vidare mer utförligt på lärdomar och utifrån dem måla upp framtiden. Nu lämnade vi historian i och med denna övning, men tidslinjen hängde kvar på väggen under hela dagen, och var naturligtvis kvar i medarbetarnas medvetande när de fortsatte med nästa steg.

Mission

Efter tidslinjen arbetade gruppen, faciliterad av Helen, fram en mission för deras arbete. Upplägget var väldigt intressant där de först jobbade kring ett negativt perspektiv för att därigenom se effekterna av deras gemensamma arbete. Avdelningen delades in i sex grupper som fick jobba kring frågeställningen:

Vad blir konsekvensen av att teamet inte finns?

Varje grupp satt och diskuterade och författade ner effekter som skulle inträffa om teamet helt plötsligt slutade jobba/försvann. Och sedan presenterades detta för varandra. Bilden nedan visar de effekter som en av grupperna såg skulle uppstå om avdelningen försvann.

Effekt om teamet inte finns

Efter presentationen fick alla rösta på de största effekterna genom att varje person fick sätta ett streck. Det var intressant att se att identifierade effekter var väldigt långtgående; det var inte bara avdelningen eller företaget som skulle få problem om avdelningen och dess anställda försvann, utan även Sverige som nation. Utifrån en motivationsaspekt så är det klart att det känns motiverande att arbeta i sammanhang som ger bidrag även på nationell nivå. Detta är en av aspekterna i Motivation 3.0 där Daniel Pink visat att det är motiverande att jobba kring ett syfte som är utanför och över dem själva. Att titta på konsekvenser av att gruppen inte finns med längre är ett bra sätt att hitta det som gruppen egentligen arbetar för.

Som nästa steg i denna övning återgick grupperna till att finna en formulering som kan fungera som en mission för avdelningen. Tanken var att missionen skulle bygga på de största effekterna avdelningen har på företaget och samhället. Alla medarbetare röstade sedan fram den version de kände var attraktivast.

Vision

Efter lunch bytte vi fokus från historien till att titta framåt i stället. Målet var att först arbeta fram en vision som beskriver avdelningen utifrån olika aspekteter fem år framåt i tiden, och att sedan hitta åtgärder som förflyttar avdelningen mot den visionen.

För att sätta gruppen i rätt mentala tillstånd berättade och visade jag en historia där de befinner sig i framtiden och har upplevt en stor framgång. Jag visade blädderblockspapper med en framtidsbeskrivning och med målbilder för de tre områdena teamwork, kunder och värderingar som grupperna skulle jobba kring.

   
Målbilderna ger riktning åt tankar och diskussioner; vad är det som har hänt och hur fungerar det då man upplever den beskrivna situationen. Målbilderna skall vara positivt orienterade så att de öppnar upp möjligheter och nyfikenhet. Tanken är att målbilden skall få deltagarna att fundera på hur det fungerar hos dem då de känner så som målbilderna beskriver. Exempelvis, hur fungerar teamarbetet och vilket stöd har den då den beskrivs som ”Energiskt, högproduktivt där de anställda tycker det är skoj att arbeta”?

Framtiden arbetades fram genom först affinity mapping där grupperna strukturerat brainstormade och skapade samsyn. Det är bra att ge lite vägledning på vad man kan fundera över. I nedanstående bild ses de strukturella aspekter av en organisation som de kunde ha i åtanke. Vad är det för ledarskap som finns och hur fungerar det, då teamarbetet upplevs som målbilden? Hur fungerar kommunikationen och vilka processer arbetar man efter, osv.

Strukturella aspekter i en organisation

Syftet med delövningen var att hjälpa grupperna komma igång med samtalet om framtiden och hur man vill att den skall vara. Det tog ett tag innan grupperna kom igång, vilket inte är ovanligt då vi är ovana att diskutera och drömma tillsammans på detta sätt. Det är bra att ha lite längre tid för denna första övning som startsträcka utan allt för stor stress.

Efter brainstormingen fick de omvandla affinity mappen och diskussionerna de haft till en visuell bild av framtiden. Nedan visas de två bilderna som arbetades fram kring teamwork.

Detta är en himla bra övning för att fördjupa samtalet och hitta aspekter i det man pratar om som man inte tänkt på innan. Att konvertera en textuell beskrivning till bilder kräver att man pratar ihop sig mer om vad man egentligen menar för att kunna finna symbolik som beskriver framtiden.

Den ena bilden ovan visar, bland annat, samarbete, visualisering, kunskapsöverföring och den andra använder symboliken med ett fotbollslag för att visualisera hur de vill att teamarbetet skall fungera. Den senare gruppens diskussioner kring fotbollsmetaforen gav tankar kring samarbete inom teamet, tydliga ansvarsområden men samtidigt T-form för att kunna hjälpa till där det behövs. Dessutom gav fotbollsmetaforen bra diskussion kring chefens roll. De vill ha en chef som fungerar mer som en coach och arbeta kring förutsättningar och strukturer innan match (projekt) för att därefter mer observera och stötta medarbetarna.

Målbild och åtgärder

När framtidsbilden var klar så fick grupperna arbeta fram en tydligare beskrivning av avdelningen om ett år. Målbilden beskrevs genom meningar och organiserade enligt de strukturella aspekterna som visades ovan. Efter framarbetad målbild jobbade grupperna kring aktiviteter som kan leda avdelningen mot målet och visionen. En del grupper jobbade med dessa två saker parallellt, dvs både identifierade mål och aktiviteter samtidigt, medan andra först diskuterade målbilden för att sedan jobba kring aktiviteter.

Aktiviteterna kategoriserades sedan i en matris på effekt och insats, för att identifiera de åtgärder som får störts effekt med minst insats, och därefter de som får stor effekt men som kräver mer för avdelningen. Denna matris var ritad på blädderblockspapper som grupperna sedan plockade med sig och presenterade för alla som avslutning

Presentation av åtgärder

Sammanfattning

Jag tycker det var en lyckad workshop. Trots att det var en stor grupp och arbetet bedrevs växelvis i grupprum spridda över två våningar, vad det bra med energi under hela dagen. Sista presentationen slutade prick på planerad sluttid, vilket var extra roligt

Avdelningen fick med sig visualiserade visioner, mer konkreta målbilder och ett antal åtgärder de kan genomföra under året. Ett bra sätt att driva förbättringsarbetet framåt efter en dag som detta är att visualisera målbilder och åtgärder på en Scrum/Kanban tavla, och ha periodiska träffar framför denna för att planera om och arbeta kring det gemensamma förbättringsarbetet. Det är också bra att periodiskt arbeta om, fördjupa förståelsen av och förändra målbilden för året. Detta så att man håller en bra energinivå kring förbättringsarbetet året ut.

Sometimes it’s hard for a team to know if they get tighter and better as a team over time. This is a tool that allows a team to learn just that.

Team barometer (self-evaluation tool) in a nutshell

The barometer is executed as a survey in a workshop. The survey consists of 16 team characteristics, packaged as a deck of cards. Team members vote green, yellow or red for each card in the meeting (or before the meeting as an anonymous survey). Once all cards have been run through, the team reflects and discusses the results. You can, if you want to, run through the exercise in thirty minutes, but I recommend to set aside an hour.

Click here to download the cards.

Background

I’ve developed this exercise for two reasons; to evaluate how/if the team gets stronger over time, and as a teambuilding alternative to action oriented retrospectives.

There are many ways a team can create feedback loops that tell them how good they are at delivering (lead times, velocity, feature vs failure demand ratio, customer feedback, etc.) but it is quite tricky to measure how well a team is working together. It’s easy to increase delivery by for example working overtime, but that doesn’t mean that the team is more efficient as a team.

Example of a card

Most retrospectives are focused on how we can solve problems we are having, or which improvements to work on next. This is of course great, we want to improve our process and our tools. But it is equally important to spend time and energy to discuss the team itself so that members build trusts and gels as a team.

The inspiration to the cards, and the statements on the cards, are from all over the place. These are some sources: Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick M. Lencioni), Teamwork is and Individual Skill (Christopher Avery), Squad Health Check (Spotify), my colleagues at Crisp, and probably many other sources from my years as an agile coach.

Note: I would not run this exercise with a dysfunctional team that struggles to get along. Other kind of work will probably provide much higher impact and help the team to get on the right track faster (such as working on defining and uniting around clear goals, discussing and creating a working agreements, defining a process that fits the team’s needs, etc.). 

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Preparations

Download the cards, print them, and cut them out. You want one deck for each participant. Click here to download the cards.

You also need voting cards. One green, one yellow and one red card for each participant. Post-it will do great.

Note: If you are doing it as an anonymous survey you download the survey instead and asks each person to fill it in and bring it to you before the workshop or retrospective. Click here to download the survey.

If you want to create your own cards, or customize them, you can find a full list of the cards in the appendix at the end.

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Running the survey

Explain the purpose of the survey and that we can, if we want to, repeat it a couple of months into the future.

Draw a table on a whiteboard. One row per card. Five columns. Sixteen rows. See illustration to the right. As you go through the cards write down the name of the card as the cards are being drawn and voted upon.

Each card has a headline naming a characteristic of a team, and a green and a red statement. Read them out loud. Give people a couple of seconds to think. Then ask them to choose one of the voting cards. Green means that you agree with the green statement, red that you agree with the red statement. A yellow vote means that you think it’s neither green nor red but something in the middle.

At a count to three everyone reveals their vote simultaneously. Count the votes and add them to the table on the whiteboard.

If someone feels the want to discuss the votes, tell them that we first do the survey and once all cards have been voted on we continue to the next step in the exercise, which will include discussions. Tell the group that the can put aside the cards as reminder so they don’t forget to raise them for discussion later.

Once you have dotted down the votes on the whiteboard, proceed with the next question.

It shouldn’t take longer than 15-20 minutes to run through the cards, unless of course you choose to allow discussions after each card.

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Reflect and summarize

Note: If you did the survey anonymously this is where the meeting starts. Draw the table along with the votes before participants enter the room.

Before proceeding to the discussions, do a factual summary of the results. Ask people to summarize what they see. Where is the voting concurrent? Where is there a lot of green? A lot of red? Where are the votes spread all over the green-yellow-red scale? It’s much better if the participants can describe this since the insights will be theirs.

Wrap up the summary by calculating the barometer value. Green = 2, Yellow = 1, and Red = 0. Write down the average for each row. Sum all the rows together and fill in the sum in the “Barometer value” square.

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Discussion

One way to start this is to simply ask – what do we need to talk about? What do you want to share?

This is all play by ear. You will never be able to anticipate which discussions that might arise. The cards cover a broad spectrum and no matter how gelled and strong the team is there will surely be some statements or votes that trigger discussions and debate.

If the team however doesn’t seem to find where to start, and silence from your part doesn’t cut it, you could ask if anyone wants to clarify their vote somewhere or if anyone has put aside a card that they wanted to discuss after the voting.

Don’t feel pushed to facilitate the discussions so that they end in actions. These kind of topics are more about trust, feelings and motivation and aren’t always actionable. Just having the discussion can be valuable enough and have strong long-term impact on behaviour and the team’s ability to collaborate.

As an ending, ask the team if they would like to do a follow up in the future. If they do, ask how far into the future. If not, end the meeting and thank people for attending and trying out the exercise.

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Follow up

If the team wants to, schedule an invite immediately after the meeting so that it is done and you can forget about it. Make sure you document the outcome and the barometer value of the meeting. The simplest approach is probably to take a photo of the whiteboard and put in on the wiki (or mail it out to the team).

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Alternatives

Fewer cards – more discussion
If you feel you want plenty of time to discuss after each voting you might want to reduce the number of cards to five or six. Choose the one that you might think reflects the teams own values and desires best, or choose the cards that you think will spur the most interesting discussions.

Perfection game – action oriented
To turn the retrospective into a more action oriented exercise you could choose only three cards. Replace the red-yellow-green voting with a perfection game where each member places a vote on a scale 1 (red) to 10 (green) along with comments on post-its that describes what that person needs or wants to happen in order to turn his or her vote to a 10. Boil down the comments and suggestion to a couple of actionable items, prioritize them and assign action points to volunteers.

.

Final note

This selection of cards, and the statements written, on them is a snapshot how I ran the exercise the last time. Every time I use them I tend to review them and fiddle around with both the number of cards and the statements written on them. I suspect that I in the future will have learned which cards spurs the best dialog and manage to reduce them to fewer than 16. I might go back and update the materials presented here, I might not.

Good luck!

.

Appendix

Last week Jimmy Janlén and I held a shortened version of our course Training from the Back of the Room for our former colleagues at Spotify. Actually it is not “our” course, but Sharon Bowmans. It’s based on her books about how create a more engaging learning experience in the class room, especially when training adults.

“I really liked the whole setup of this course – a really well organised and inspiring day. Wow :-)”

Jimmy and I are certified trainers of this course. We use the techniques when we do training. But we have also experienced how useful they are in other coaching and facilitation situations, such as workshops and retrospectives. Almost any meeting can be made more engaging and with longer lasting result with the set of tools TBR provides.

We have chosen to call the shortened training Facilitating from the Back of the Room, since that is what we agile coaches do most. 16 persons from the Spotify Agile Guild showed up this beautiful day in a corner room on the 17:th floor in High Tech building with amazing views over Stockholm city. We have to admit we were a little nervous at first. Would this actually make sense to coaches? It did.

“I was engaged and not once felt tired or sleepy even after lunch”

At the heart of TBR is creating an environment where the facilitator is not the most important person in the room that do all the talking and moving. As teacher we really need to step into  the background. Jimmy and I are not that used to doing that. We like to be in the limelight. But with Sharons excellent training instructions we managed to take both one and two steps back. That was a new and exciting feeling. The energy in the room was no longer coming from us, but from the participants.

“I really got a toolbox filled with tools and tricks”

And what an energy. The first hour we spent connecting with each other and the topic. An important part is the recursive nature of the training: We use the methods we teach to do the training, which means we do not only reflect on the content of the training, but also on the way we do the training. We get to teach by example.

Next we had three sections to learn and train on 6 Trumps, 6 ways to enhance long term memory and the 4C map. In terms of the 4C that’s the Concept and Concrete Practice parts. Here we could also show the fractal nature of the training method. Not only do you design the day according to the 4C map, but also each section. We started it of with a Data Hunt, which got everyone up and moving.

“Very thought provoking”

During the day we covered more than 30 activities you can use as a facilitator, which was visible during the Concept clinics at the end of the day where we listed activities to use for meetings such as Team Building, Retrospective, Lunch & Learn.

A large part of the afternoon was spent on designing your own 4C map for a real situation. Many of the participants had upcoming workshops that they now redesigned.

“4C’s map is a good way to structure things =) Workshops, meetings, …”

After a day like this you really need a good closure and we spend more than an hour on the last C, Conclusion. During the last Celebration Circle we really got the impression that this had given people new really helpful tools. And perhaps most fun of all: they thanked each other as much as us for all the learning: a true learning community had formed during the day.

We also learned a lot and got great feedback.

“Respectful and knowledgable trainers”

If you think this sounds interesting, get in touch with us. We offer the Facilitating from the Back of the Room as an in house training. We think organizations and companies can gain a lot from learning these techniques. Or join the public full day course at Crisp in November.

Otroligt kul att se hur många som fick plats i ett konceptrum i Aula Magna under våra presentationer under SAST Q20! Vi pratade först om kontinuerlig förbättring och sedan om working agreements. Slides hittar du nedan.

• Kontinuerlig förbättring
• Working Agreements

På Crisp har vi en hel del gratis material och guider, bland annat en Toyota Kata mall, som Martin nämnde under sin presentation.

Vi pratade också om Mobprogrammering, och den främsta källan till information finns på mobprogramming.com.

Tack till er alla som kom och lyssnade och vi ber om ursäkt för att alla inte fick plats.

/Martin & Mikael

This is a strong retrospective for bringing issues up to the surface. Instead of just one person expressing an issue as a positive or a negative, the whole team feedbacks about the importance of the issue. The team then decides which issues to tackle. The retrospective also exposes issues where there is not common view, and highlights areas of alignment. It also allows the team to ask tough questions in a safe environment.

Material

Post it notes, pens and a white board. A room that has space for the participants to move around.

Preparation

On 5 post it notes write down the numbers 1 – 5. Space them out on a wall radiating out from the board, with 5 closest to the board, and 1 furthest away. On the whiteboard, set up a grid with 6 columns, the first column is for the post it notes, number the next 5 columns from five to one.

Method

Check in with the team

What happened this sprint, and how do they feel about it?

Generate insightful statements

Ask each person to write down statements, one per post-it note. These need to be strongly opinionated, the more precise the better. Make sure to give your team some examples especially if this is their first time running this retrospective. E.g:

• The product we’re working on is going to be the best in class.
• We will be able to finish features 1, 2 and 3 before the holidays.
• I feel motivated to work on this team.
• I love coming into work every morning.

A couple of notes per person is good. Some people have a hard time coming up with statements, others can think up of tons, and that’s ok.

Statements that are more specific will generate better insights and discussions. But this typically self corrects, someone typically asks for clarification when a statement is unclear.

Visualize the team’s opinions

Gather the post it notes from the participants. Read out the notes one at a time. Instruct the team to vote with their feet, by standing closest to the number that best represents how much they agree with the statements. A 5 is “strongly agree”, a 1 is “strongly disagree”, and a 3 is “neutral”. To keep it easy stick with whole numbers, this is just to give the team a general idea of what everybody else thinks.

Place the post it note in the first column. Record the votes on the board after reading each statement.

Continue until all the statements have been read. Ask the author of the statement to clarify if a question comes up.

Vote for topics to discuss

Ask the team to vote on which statements they’d like to discuss. Dot voting on the board works well, or choose your favorite method.

Discuss and agree to actions

Start with the statement that has the most votes, and see how far you get, typically 2-3 statements will get the most votes. Sometimes it’s enough for the team to discuss the statement, and reach a common understanding. Most often there will be action points. If there are too many action points on the board, ask the team which ones will give them the most bang for the buck and agree to those.

Positive feedback

End the retrospective by asking the team for spontaneous appreciations. This opens up for people to thank those who were especially vulnerable in discussions during the retrospective, and also for giving positive feedback to individuals or to the whole team that weren’t captured given this retrospective format.

Feedback about the retro

It’s good to end the retrospective by asking for feedback. You can do this in any way you like, by asking for a return on time investment, by doing a meta retrospective of the retrospective, by asking for improvements. Whatever method you choose, make sure you get the feedback you need so you’re facilitating meetings that are valuable and helpful to the team.

Large group retrospectives are long, large, unwieldy facilitations. So much so that they’re typically done only at the end of a project. Holding a 1-2 day retro every few weeks for a large project is neither practical nor responsible, but continually improving the project is also important.  So, how do you hold light-weight retrospectives for large groups, while making sure that you:

• Have a common understanding
• Identify issues and strengths
• Reach a group agreement on action points
• Ensure that the group feels that they received a high return on time invested

This retrospective combines different techniques and technologies to achieve these results.

Material

Large post-it notes, small post-it notes, pens, flipchart paper. A room large enough for all the participants where they can sit in smaller groups of 4-5 people. If you have flipcharts on easels set up the room with 4-5 chairs around each flip chart. If you’ve got a room with tables set them up for group of 4-5 people.

Preparation

Purpose and expected outcome: Start out by making sure there is a clear purpose to the retrospective. Why is this group of people having a retrospective? What is the expected outcome? Write the purpose and outcome on flip chart paper. 

Topics of discussion

With the purpose and expected outcome in place you can start gathering topics of discussion. You can set these by asking the group for suggested topics, by talking to the person(s) asking for the retrospective, and by observing the group. Once you have a list of topics, narrow them down to the most important/relevant topics to the purpose and expected outcome. 5-8 is a good number. Formulate the topics as opinionated statements.

Setup a live polling session

Using your favorite live polling application (I’ve used mentimeter) create the structure for the retrospective. Here’s an example:

1. Check in – Tag cloud
2. Project review, highlight what’s happened since the last retrospective, or milestone – Free form input
3. Gathering data – Opinion sliders – one per topic, as many as you can fit on one page
4. Return on time invested – 1-5
5. Feedback on what worked well or could be improved – Free form input

Method

Introduction & Check in

Put up instructions in the room to get the group started with the live polling application you’re using. A tag cloud is a good check in format, you can ask how they’re feeling today, what their expectations are, or anything else that’s relevant. This helps you get engagement right away.

Introduce the agenda for the meeting. Point out the purpose and expected outcome. Make sure that the participants are ok with both. Make sure the purpose and expected outcome are visible throughout the retro.

Project review

What’s happened since the last retrospective, or milestone? Crowdsource on the spot using a free input form with your app.

Gathering data

Next ask the group to give their input on the topics that were sourced before the retrospective. If your app allows it, show all the options on one page. Hide the results until everybody has voted. Finally show all the results. Give the group time to read them.

Generating proposals

Now that it’s clear how everybody feels about the topics, introduce the proposal forming step: Ask the participants to split themselves up based on the topic that they’d like to discuss. Make sure each group has no more than 5 people.

Give each group instructions:

1. Select a timekeeper. This helps the groups keep themselves focused.
2. Discuss what things can be improved in this area, and what things are working well.
3. Come up with just one proposal for how we can improve in this area. And one proposal that strengthens what we’re currently doing. Write those on the large post-it notes.

This section can be time boxed to 20 minutes. Some groups will need more time, that’s ok, schedule in a 10 – 15 minute break here. Some groups will need less time, let them know they can start their break early.

Tip: Make sure that each large post-it is easy to associate to its group. You can use different colors for different groups, or have the participants write their names at the bottom. This helps you easily figure out who to ask for clarifications later.

Break

Be clear about when the break ends.  

Presentation of the proposals

Ask each group to present their improvement and strengthening proposals. Have them place their notes on a wall or a board.

Action points

Group the proposals if applicable, Next, let everybody vote for their top three proposals. You can use pens and dots, or stickers.

Go through the action points that received the most votes. Ask if anybody needs any more clarifications. If not, verify that everybody’s ok with the action point. Now make sure it’s clear who’s affected by the action point. Is this a change to the team’s working agreements? Did this create a new process? Remove a process? Decide who will make sure that the action point gets communicated and done.

Return on time invested

Verify that this was time well invested, and ask for feedback about what worked and didn’t. If this is your first time using an app during a meeting, ask what the participants thought. Thank everybody for participating, and close the retrospective!

Notes and observations

Running a mostly silent retrospective, a lot of the questions are answered using the app, might make you feel like people aren’t engaged. But when I’ve used it, the feedback has been that people felt even more connected, especially in such a large group. So it’s ok that everybody’s looking down at their phones. They’re actively engaging with each other!

This retrospective can be run in about 1.5 hours. The introduction and initial voting takes about 10 minutes. Splitting into groups and generating proposals including a break takes about 30 minutes. Proposal presentation is just a minute or two per group. Voting takes about 5 minutes. Clarifications take about 10 minutes. Some groups are wordier than others, and some groups are more or less aligned. Help your groups stick to two proposals and to the time box. You don’t want to overwhelm the participants with proposals, 2 per group is plenty!

You may have read about this elsewhere, but a recent event led me to write this. I feel that the working agreements concept is not given the attention it deserves. Working agreements are about making your culture explicit. It is desirable to have them visualised on your Scrum board as a constant reminder. Question is, when do we remove them from the board so that they don’t cover the whole board? My answer is, when the third state is reached, “internalised”.

A change in your working agreements is a typical outcome of your retrospective. Initially it is probably a change in your culture and the only thing you have agreed upon is to try it. Later you will evaluate how it turned out in practice. Perhaps it never picked up or it became an established part of your way of working.

When a working agreement has been established for a long time, it is so deeply rooted that you never need to be reminded about it. You do not need a post-it on your board saying “we wear clothes when at office”. It is internalized or if you wish, self-evident.

So a working agreement goes from being new, being established to being internalised. On the way it may be discontinued. A programmer at heart, I would like to illustrate the states in a diagram.

As you can see from the diagram, sometimes you take a step back. You simply forget about something you once agreed upon. It is important to stay cool about it, things like that happens. Bad habits can return because there was a logic to them in the first place, it could be a new member in the team or something else. It is an opportunity for reflection when you discover that you lost a good habit. Maybe the agreement is not that great or maybe the context has changed. If it is a valuable agreement it will stand, not to worry.

In practice

Decide on two colors, e.g. green and yellow, that represents the states of a working agreement. The last state need no color as you remove it from the board.

When you create a new agreement, write it on a green note together with the date when it was decided. The date is for later when you consider if an agreement has been established or not. Has it not been around for long, you probably can not call it established. Is it getting old and not becoming established, you need to consider why. Why have we forgot about it? Is it something wrong about it? Is it to vague, like “be nice”?

If you, as a team, agree that it is established, write it on a yellow note. I usually keep the original date but it might be interesting to also note the date it was established. That way you can see how long it takes to establish agreements.

As you learned from the diagram, it is possible to fall back and forget about an established agreement. When you do, write it again on a green note.

Finally, one day, you can say to yourself that an agreement feels self-evident. It has become an internal part of the team culture. It goes without saying. You can remove it from the board.

If that makes you feel a bit anxious, take it to an information graveyard, like your company wiki, and bury it there. The memory of it will be cherished every day as we carry it with us, forming the way we are against each other.

Gamification, how many do you know?

A small game I do to start a reflection upon our agreements, is to ask everyone to write down the agreements from memory. The one who knows most of them, wins. Simple, but sparks the discussion. Some were remembered by everyone and some by no one. Why? Because it is evident or because we do not respect it?

Lastly, I keep our agreements on a A3 paper so I can detach them from the board. It also a good size factor that limits the number of agreements.

See also this understand more on the benefits of working agreements: https://blog.crisp.se/2017/01/29/yassalsundman/role-expectations-and-working-agreements

Meaningful inclusive retrospectives are possible with distributed teams. Let’s talk about the basics you need to have in place, how you can facilitate a distributed retrospective, and what to look out for. This guide is based on the retrospective format that we used at LRF Media. The retrospective participants included 5 team members at the office in Stockholm, one person working from home, and 2 people working at the Kraków office.

The Basics

1. Video conferencing solution. Something you can use to stream from all locations, and also share the screen. E.g. Google Hangouts, Zoom, Appear:in, Skype, Slack.
2. Camera, and microphone/speaker system. The team members in Kraków, as well as the person working from home, used their own computers, so the built in cameras worked well. The group in the Stockholm office used a camera that showed everybody in the room. You should invest in a good microphone/speaker system for your setup as well, we suffered from bad sound quality on and off in the conference room.
3. Online retrospective/whiteboard solution. There are many out there, including interactive whiteboards like the one my colleague Henrik Kniberg has made! If you already have a license then use the product you have. We used Trello! It’s a bit unconventional, but it worked really well, and we didn’t need to add yet another product/login/url.

Agenda and facilitation

The agenda can follow a typical co-located retrospective agenda. In this case I’ll go over how I facilitated a “What worked well”, “What can be improved” retrospective using Trello. I would definitely use a whiteboard solution if I were doing a timeline as well, but we didn’t do that for this retrospective.

1. Check in – It’s really important to make sure that everybody’s voice is heard, even more so when face to face interaction is significantly reduced. Start by asking how the team felt about the sprint, for example. Make sure that everybody gets a chance to say something. Be very clear on the order that you’ll use to keep the meeting moving.
2. Gathering input – We created columns in Trello: “What worked well”, “What can be improved” and “Appreciations”. Each person got to add their notes as cards to the respective columns. You can collaborate real-time simultaneously, which we did by making sure everybody had a computer and login to Trello.
3. Read appreciations out loud – I really want to give a shout out to “appreciations” especially in a distributed retrospective. Most teams are not good at giving feedback even when they work face to face. So before we got to work on improvements each participant got to read the appreciations they had added to the Trello board out loud.
4. Grouping – Now it’s time to look at the positives and changes. Instead of visually grouping the cards in Trello we went through the cards and removed all duplicate notes. This gives the added bonus of allowing people to clarify what they mean.
5. Vote for discussion topics – We voted for a card by adding ourselves as members on the card! It was very easy to see which topics got the most votes, and the process was relatively quick as everybody could vote at the same time.
6. Discuss – As with any retrospective, it’s good to limit the number of points discussed, pick the top 2 or 3 and open the floor for discussion. It’s really important to allow for longer silences due to lag time and people not being sure if it’s ok to start talking. As a facilitator you can explicitly ask if anyone wants to comment. Don’t forget people who aren’t at your own location.
7. Documenting Action points –  We added a fourth column to our Trello board. Each action point was written as a card description.
8. Close the retro – Ask for feedback on how to improve, and thank all the participants.

Conclusions

Well, this sounds really easy.. There were no problems?

• The microphone. Make sure you have a working solution given the number of people who are participating and the shape of the space you’re in.
• It is easy to just talk to the people sitting in the same room. Especially when the board is projected on the screen. I would love to try this retrospective out with each person sitting at their own desk with a headset. I think this would put everybody on even footing.
• You are influenced by what other people write. As soon as the notes started showing up on the Trello board it was difficult to not be influenced by what other people wrote. It would be nice to have a solution where the cards are face down and you can flip them over, or that you can stop syncing until everybody’s done writing. Otherwise it was great having Trello update so quickly!

Final thoughts

We were really happy with the simplicity and collaborative power that Trello offered. This was one of the most successful distributed retros I’ve participated in, and it opened up the possibility for someone working from home to easily participate. Finally, it’s really in the attitude, the team at LRF Media were keen to make sure that distributed development worked and they were all willing to meet each other halfway.

Scrum received some criticism today in Computer Sweden. The article featured an interview of Ken Schwaber and our guy Henrik Kniberg. Tobias Fors from Citerus was giving the comment that Scrum lacked support for retrospective. I am not sure if he was quoted correctly.

I am in the belief that Scrum has three roles, three artefacts and three meetings. Of the latter, there is one you should never skip.

The thing is, if you wish to get any better, you need to start thinking about what you do. If you do not do that, you will just muddle on like before. You probably reflect on your own ways, once in a while, as an individual, but you also need to do that as a group.

The only meeting you should never skip is the retrospective. Yet that is what seems to be happening very often, from what I hear and from the feature I mentioned.

As long as you do retrospective meetings, you can improve. You probably find that planning is also a good thing to do. But if you skipped retrospective and did planning only, you would not have a time to discuss how planning could improve. Except during your coffee break when everyone lets out their frustration anyway.

So how do you do a good retrospective meeting? There are many ways to go about, I’m sure, but let me give you a simple one that I even tried at home on a Sunday.

Divide a board in “good”and “not so good”. Hand out post-it notices and pens to everyone. Let everyone write down anything that springs to their minds when thinking about the last sprint (or last month, if you’re not iterative yet).

As they write down their thoughts, for each note, they place them on the board and states shortly what it is about. Try to refrain from discussion, is there any disagreement, just note that fact.

After a ten minutes, or when all are content, look through the notes and see if they some should be considered duplicates. If so, put them next to each other.

Now each participant is given 3 votes to put on the notes they feel is most important. All votes may be spent on one note or spread on more.

Count the votes and focus a discussion on the top five notes. Make a list of improvements from that and put on the wall visible to all.

If you coach a scrum team but you’re not around to observe them during the sprint, how do you know how they felt about it?

Ask them.

You can interview them individually or as a group. Both approaches have their problems and limitations. Individual interviews take a lot of time, and sometimes you can’t share the results without breaking confidence. If you ask them as a group you usually only get answers from the most outspoken people because:

It’s hard to talk about your feelings among strangers.

One of the teams I coach had mixed feelings about Scrum. Some were healthily skeptical, and some positive. The first sprint went very well, with a good sprint planning, a lot of initial energy and a demo that actually showed customer value. But I felt that some of the team members were not too sure how the others felt about the whole thing. I wanted to help them with that and also get some feedback myself (I admit I was a bit nervous about not being around).

I used Emo-lines.*

Here’s how you do it. First draw a time-line representing the whole sprint and ask everyone to put up notes, marking memorable or unusual events. The team’s looked something like this:

Then you prepare for the Emo-lines, start by drawing a line directly underneath the time-line. The line represents neutral feelings, with feeling good above, and feeling bad below:

Next, have each person draw how they felt during the spring using different colored markers, starting at the sprint planning and ending with the sprint demo. Here’s a simplified version of the team’s chart:

The team members’ feelings varied greatly, you can see from the chart that the sprint demo went well though because everyone felt pretty good at the end.

The next step is to ask each person to comment on his/her line. Here’s what the team said:

Mr Green – a skeptic at first.

Mr Green is a very influential person in the group and the architect, he was the first to go. He said that he was a bit skeptical at first (as everyone had noticed during the scrum training right before the sprint started). He was worried that sitting and working in a team room would interfere too much with his flow and his privacy. As the sprint went on, he came to appreciate how quick and easy communication was with the new setup and realized that it was rather fun working that way. And when the first demo went well, well…

Mr Blue – a scrum advocate who got lonely.

Mr Blue was one of the driving forces in introducing Scrum to the company and the only one who was a certified scrum master. So I was a bit surprised and worried that he had such a dip after the first week. As it turns out, during the second week he had to work from home because his kids were sick, so he felt isolated and unproductive.

Mr Orange – an enthusiast both when skeptical and when not.

Mr Orange was also one of the skeptical-at-first but enthusiastically so. At the beginning of the sprint he felt that it was fun and that it worked for him. The problem was that they actually completed the whole sprint backlog mid-sprint and he thought that was boring and unproductive. As soon that they got some extra work from the product owner he was happy again.

Are Emo-lines useful?

The team thinks so, and they decided to use them at the next retrospective. The second time they got even more out of the chart, each line showed more variation and the explanations were more detailed.

They are also valuable to me as a coach. Even when I am not with the team during the sprint I get detailed feedback about how the team feels at the end of each sprint.

I also noticed more than one surprised look on the other team members’ faces when Mr Green talked about his line, and I think some team building took place.

Here’s a picture of the whiteboard:

*If someone has another name for these, please let me know, I heard about them from my colleague David Barnholdt, and he didn’t have a name either.

Emo, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo

When we develop using agile principles we have learned to "do the simplest thing that can possibly work". What happens if we apply this thought to agile methodology itself?

What is the minimum number of principles and processes that we need, to be able to benefit from agile? Finding them should help us know what to focus on when introducing and using agile methods.

In my experience the three most important components in a successful application of agile methods are:

• Joy
• WIP limit
• Regular retrospectives

Joy

When striving for high productivity and a sustainable pace, I have found that joy is the key factor. It’s simply not possible to work really really hard for a long time if you don’t enjoy what you do. In addition, things that make the workplace and the work situation more productive also improve the mood of the team. It’s a positive spiral, people like the feeling of being productive and if you have fun it’s easier to become more productive.

So, sometimes when to choosing which way to go if you want to improve productivity, look at the joy factor too. Things that work in favor of a joyful workplace are for example: high spirits, control over your own work situation, recognition, trust, humbleness,…

WIP limit

Nothing in my experience can increase a team’s focus more than limiting the amount of work in progress (WIP). A natural reaction when a team feels pressed for time is to start working on more tasks. Probably it feels more productive to do something else if you for some reason are blocked, but it has the opposite effect since you start more work that you might be able to finish and thus wasting man hours.

With a WIP limit you are forced to address the issues that prevent you from finishing tasks, because you are simply not allowed to start a new task until the present one is finished if you have reached the WIP limit. This reveals obstacles faster and focuses on fixing them before moving on.

In my current team, we would never have automated so many tests unless we had reached the WIP limit and found that testing was the bottle neck that prevented us from starting new development tasks. The immediate solution was to have the entire team dig in and do testing, but soon some developers (who hated testing) decided to automate as many tests as possible to remove the bottle neck so that they could go back to coding. The testers found this to be very helpful, since they were so busy testing that they never found the time to automate the tests…

Regular retrospectives

Inspect and adapt. Without the possibility to change the work process itself, improvement isn’t possible. Since we never get things right the first time (we continuously learn things we didn’t know before) and the world keeps changing, we need to regularly evaluate our way of working. Can we change something to increase productivity, joy, focus?

Again, I have seen teams pressed for time going the wrong way, skipping retrospectives in order to save time (why put the whole team in a room discussing things when we already know what we have to do – deliver code?). But skipping retrospectives means cementing the way you work and you may never get out of the trouble you’re in.

I have just, as a guest blogger, posted a new post at the blog owned by the development team at TV4 Digital Media; “Några övningar vi gjort under retrospektiven”. It´s a post, in swedish, describing a few retrospective exercises we have done during the last sprints.

I’m contracted by TV4 Digial Media as an Agile coach to help them improve the collaboration, both in the development team as well as between them and the business side. It is very fun that they let my write a post as a guest blogger

I had taken on to facilitate a retrospective for my colleagues’ team. They wanted a different retrospective than the usual. So we borrowed Crisp’s office and used Jimmy Cards!

The group was around 15 persons from two teams. They all knew each other well which I believe is crucial as the questions on the cards can be challenging.

In this post I’ll give you the recipe which Jimmy and I came up with for this particular retrospective.

Divide the participants in groups of size about 5 persons. Each group sits together at a table. I like to name groups after Formula 1 teams, but that is not essential.

The retrospective has two phases:

1. Throwing questions at each other and coming up with improvement themes.
2. Discussing selected themes, current situation and definition of awesome.

Give each group a number of cards to choose from. This day, I gave them 7 each.

The first phase has several rounds where one round is like this:

1. A group selects a card with a question they like to hear the answer to.
2. The group selects another group that are asked the question.
3. The group that got the question tries to come up with as many answers as possible. They are discussing out loud and the other groups are expected to listen carefully.
4. All groups now writes down a theme of improvement. Here it is important to facilitate as it is easy to start discussing the theme instead of getting it on paper.
5. The groups presents their themes and sticks them on the wall.

New round. You can do as many as you please. Each round will give you as many themes as there are groups. In this case, we used 3 rounds for 3 groups, giving 10 themes (a bonus theme as well).

Enter the second phase. First the participants vote on the themes and the winners are picked out. We had three themes that stood out in popularity so it was natural to pick the top three.

Now, the themes are given a table each (or spot in the room) and the participants are asked to self-organise from the constraints so that there will be:

1. Enough people at each theme.
2. Mixed opinions at each theme.

Each theme is discussed and the answers to the following is sought:
1. Where are we now?
2. What is the definition of awesome for this? Here we wish to stretch our mind to something that might not even be possible.
3. What would be 5 examples of concrete steps that we could do now, that would head in the direction of awesome?

Round off with presentations.

The feedback from this occasion were very positive, “the best retrospective in years”.

Retrospective is the only meeting that you can’t skip, as I have said before so take care of it.

Nyligen så hjälpte jag till med att planera och facilitera en affärsplanering hos en kund. Då jag tycker både utfallet och genomförandet var väldigt bra så kommer här en beskrivning av vad vi gjorde och de olika övningar vi hade. Det var en relativt stor grupp som samlats föra att genomföra den årliga affärsplaneringen, vilket syftade till att utifrån företagets övergripande mål finna vad denna avdelning skall göra under året som kommer. Alla som varit med på dessa tillställningar vet att de kan vara rätt tunga och inte alltid kopplade till medarbetarnas vardag. Jag känner dock att detta tillfälle bröt traditionen, mycket på grund av att de aktuella cheferna fokuserade på att jobba kring det positiva och möjligheter i stället för problem och hinder.

Det var en grupp på 30 personer fördelade i två olika linjegrupper, och huvudmålet var att finna förändringsåtgärder för året som kommer. På vägen mot det målet, en väg som var lika viktig som slutmålet i sig, jobbade gruppen kring sin historia, arbetade fram en mission och sedan en framtidsbild om var de vill vara fem år framåt i tiden.

Jag var med under förberedelserna av denna dag och faciliterade själv eftermiddagspasset. Henrik och Helen, de två gruppcheferna faciliterade förmiddagen under arbetet med historien och missionen.

I en kommande post kommer jag att berätta lite kring Appreciative Inquiry, en förändringsprocess baserad på positiv psykologi, och hur den väl passar ihop med en systematisk förändringsprocess som Toyota Kata. Även om denna workshop inte var renlärig någon av dessa processer, hade jag dem i bakhuvudet under planeringen och mycket av dess tankar återkommer i de olika övningarna. Denna post är dock mer en händelserapport av denna aktuella workshop.

Upplägg

Agendan för dagen var:

• Arbeta fram en tidslinje från första persons anställning till idag (från 1970 framåt)
• Arbeta fram en mission för avdelningen
• Etablera en visionsbild fem år framåt
• Definiera målbilder där avdelningen skall vara om ett år
• Definiera åtgärder som skall genomföras under året för att nå målbilderna

Vi hade ett stort konferensrum till vårt förfogande samt ett antal mindre rum där grupparbeten genomfördes. Tyvärr var borden fasta så det gick inte att skapa gruppmöblering i det stora rummet. I övningar som detta är det bra att ha alla samlade i samma rum under hela tillställningen. Det är då lättare att växla mellan grupparbete och korta presentationer. Under grupparbete så divigerar grupperna tankemässigt från varandra, vilket är bra. Det är dock viktigt att konvergera frekvent, vilket händer då man får lyssna och se vad övriga grupper gör. I och med att grupperna var utspridda under gruppövningarna så minskade vi därmed frekvensen av presentationer då vi annars skulle spenderat för stor del att förflytta oss mellan rummen.

Tidslinjen

Att arbeta fram en tidslinje över en period bakåt är en vanlig övning att börja med under retrospektiv. Övningen hjälper en grupp att komma ihåg vad som har hänt under den tid som man skall reflektera över. Den hjälper gruppen att komma ihåg signifikanta händelser och därmed kunna länka dem till det resultat man skapade tillsammans. Tidslinjen kan med fördel användas till att synliggöra andra aspekter också. Jag har tidigare använt den under en team uppstart där varje teammedlem fick berätta sin historia 10 år bakåt. I denna workshop fick medarbetarna berätta hela avdelningens historia från det att den bildades på 70-talet till idag.

Tidslinje från första anställning till idag

Gruppen delades in i 6 grupper baserat på år på banken. Dessa fick sedan tillsammans identifiera signifikanta händelser under åren från deras anställning började till idag. De jobbade kring både positiva händelser och negativa händelser. Varje grupp presenterade sedan sina lappar och placerade ut dem på tidslinjen där de positiva placerades över linjen och de negative under. Bilden ovan visar resultatet där gröna och orange lappar visar olika händelser.

Efter alla grupper presenterat hjälpte Henrik gruppen att finna lärdomar som går att dra från historien. Dessa lärdomar skrevs ner på rosa lappar och sattes upp på tidslinjen.

Detta är en väldigt bra övning som ger en samsyn kring den gemensamma historien, och som ofta ger en stolthet och positiv energi för det fortsatta arbetet. Det är ofta så att det är mest positiva saker som kommer fram; vi har en naturlig tendens att komma ihåg och fokusera på det positiva när vi tillsammans tänker tillbaka på vår historia. En miss som vi gjorde under denna del var att inte vara konsekvent med färgerna på postit lapparna. Tidslinjen blir kraftfullare visuellt om varje färg representerar någon typ av information. I detta faller borde vi haft enbart gröna lappar för händelser och sedan rosa lappar för lärdomar.

Det går att basera en hel retrospektiv på bara denna övning, där man kan jobba vidare mer utförligt på lärdomar och utifrån dem måla upp framtiden. Nu lämnade vi historian i och med denna övning, men tidslinjen hängde kvar på väggen under hela dagen, och var naturligtvis kvar i medarbetarnas medvetande när de fortsatte med nästa steg.

Mission

Efter tidslinjen arbetade gruppen, faciliterad av Helen, fram en mission för deras arbete. Upplägget var väldigt intressant där de först jobbade kring ett negativt perspektiv för att därigenom se effekterna av deras gemensamma arbete. Avdelningen delades in i sex grupper som fick jobba kring frågeställningen:

Vad blir konsekvensen av att teamet inte finns?

Varje grupp satt och diskuterade och författade ner effekter som skulle inträffa om teamet helt plötsligt slutade jobba/försvann. Och sedan presenterades detta för varandra. Bilden nedan visar de effekter som en av grupperna såg skulle uppstå om avdelningen försvann.

Effekt om teamet inte finns

Efter presentationen fick alla rösta på de största effekterna genom att varje person fick sätta ett streck. Det var intressant att se att identifierade effekter var väldigt långtgående; det var inte bara avdelningen eller företaget som skulle få problem om avdelningen och dess anställda försvann, utan även Sverige som nation. Utifrån en motivationsaspekt så är det klart att det känns motiverande att arbeta i sammanhang som ger bidrag även på nationell nivå. Detta är en av aspekterna i Motivation 3.0 där Daniel Pink visat att det är motiverande att jobba kring ett syfte som är utanför och över dem själva. Att titta på konsekvenser av att gruppen inte finns med längre är ett bra sätt att hitta det som gruppen egentligen arbetar för.

Som nästa steg i denna övning återgick grupperna till att finna en formulering som kan fungera som en mission för avdelningen. Tanken var att missionen skulle bygga på de största effekterna avdelningen har på företaget och samhället. Alla medarbetare röstade sedan fram den version de kände var attraktivast.

Vision

Efter lunch bytte vi fokus från historien till att titta framåt i stället. Målet var att först arbeta fram en vision som beskriver avdelningen utifrån olika aspekteter fem år framåt i tiden, och att sedan hitta åtgärder som förflyttar avdelningen mot den visionen.

För att sätta gruppen i rätt mentala tillstånd berättade och visade jag en historia där de befinner sig i framtiden och har upplevt en stor framgång. Jag visade blädderblockspapper med en framtidsbeskrivning och med målbilder för de tre områdena teamwork, kunder och värderingar som grupperna skulle jobba kring.

   
Målbilderna ger riktning åt tankar och diskussioner; vad är det som har hänt och hur fungerar det då man upplever den beskrivna situationen. Målbilderna skall vara positivt orienterade så att de öppnar upp möjligheter och nyfikenhet. Tanken är att målbilden skall få deltagarna att fundera på hur det fungerar hos dem då de känner så som målbilderna beskriver. Exempelvis, hur fungerar teamarbetet och vilket stöd har den då den beskrivs som ”Energiskt, högproduktivt där de anställda tycker det är skoj att arbeta”?

Framtiden arbetades fram genom först affinity mapping där grupperna strukturerat brainstormade och skapade samsyn. Det är bra att ge lite vägledning på vad man kan fundera över. I nedanstående bild ses de strukturella aspekter av en organisation som de kunde ha i åtanke. Vad är det för ledarskap som finns och hur fungerar det, då teamarbetet upplevs som målbilden? Hur fungerar kommunikationen och vilka processer arbetar man efter, osv.

Strukturella aspekter i en organisation

Syftet med delövningen var att hjälpa grupperna komma igång med samtalet om framtiden och hur man vill att den skall vara. Det tog ett tag innan grupperna kom igång, vilket inte är ovanligt då vi är ovana att diskutera och drömma tillsammans på detta sätt. Det är bra att ha lite längre tid för denna första övning som startsträcka utan allt för stor stress.

Efter brainstormingen fick de omvandla affinity mappen och diskussionerna de haft till en visuell bild av framtiden. Nedan visas de två bilderna som arbetades fram kring teamwork.

Detta är en himla bra övning för att fördjupa samtalet och hitta aspekter i det man pratar om som man inte tänkt på innan. Att konvertera en textuell beskrivning till bilder kräver att man pratar ihop sig mer om vad man egentligen menar för att kunna finna symbolik som beskriver framtiden.

Den ena bilden ovan visar, bland annat, samarbete, visualisering, kunskapsöverföring och den andra använder symboliken med ett fotbollslag för att visualisera hur de vill att teamarbetet skall fungera. Den senare gruppens diskussioner kring fotbollsmetaforen gav tankar kring samarbete inom teamet, tydliga ansvarsområden men samtidigt T-form för att kunna hjälpa till där det behövs. Dessutom gav fotbollsmetaforen bra diskussion kring chefens roll. De vill ha en chef som fungerar mer som en coach och arbeta kring förutsättningar och strukturer innan match (projekt) för att därefter mer observera och stötta medarbetarna.

Målbild och åtgärder

När framtidsbilden var klar så fick grupperna arbeta fram en tydligare beskrivning av avdelningen om ett år. Målbilden beskrevs genom meningar och organiserade enligt de strukturella aspekterna som visades ovan. Efter framarbetad målbild jobbade grupperna kring aktiviteter som kan leda avdelningen mot målet och visionen. En del grupper jobbade med dessa två saker parallellt, dvs både identifierade mål och aktiviteter samtidigt, medan andra först diskuterade målbilden för att sedan jobba kring aktiviteter.

Aktiviteterna kategoriserades sedan i en matris på effekt och insats, för att identifiera de åtgärder som får störts effekt med minst insats, och därefter de som får stor effekt men som kräver mer för avdelningen. Denna matris var ritad på blädderblockspapper som grupperna sedan plockade med sig och presenterade för alla som avslutning

Presentation av åtgärder

Sammanfattning

Jag tycker det var en lyckad workshop. Trots att det var en stor grupp och arbetet bedrevs växelvis i grupprum spridda över två våningar, vad det bra med energi under hela dagen. Sista presentationen slutade prick på planerad sluttid, vilket var extra roligt

Avdelningen fick med sig visualiserade visioner, mer konkreta målbilder och ett antal åtgärder de kan genomföra under året. Ett bra sätt att driva förbättringsarbetet framåt efter en dag som detta är att visualisera målbilder och åtgärder på en Scrum/Kanban tavla, och ha periodiska träffar framför denna för att planera om och arbeta kring det gemensamma förbättringsarbetet. Det är också bra att periodiskt arbeta om, fördjupa förståelsen av och förändra målbilden för året. Detta så att man håller en bra energinivå kring förbättringsarbetet året ut.

Sometimes it’s hard for a team to know if they get tighter and better as a team over time. This is a tool that allows a team to learn just that.

Team barometer (self-evaluation tool) in a nutshell

The barometer is executed as a survey in a workshop. The survey consists of 16 team characteristics, packaged as a deck of cards. Team members vote green, yellow or red for each card in the meeting (or before the meeting as an anonymous survey). Once all cards have been run through, the team reflects and discusses the results. You can, if you want to, run through the exercise in thirty minutes, but I recommend to set aside an hour.

Click here to download the cards.

Damián Buonamico has translated the cards to Spanish. He has also created a version 2.0 with some additional questions. Check it out here.

Background

I’ve developed this exercise for two reasons; to evaluate how/if the team gets stronger over time, and as a teambuilding alternative to action oriented retrospectives.

There are many ways a team can create feedback loops that tell them how good they are at delivering (lead times, velocity, feature vs failure demand ratio, customer feedback, etc.) but it is quite tricky to measure how well a team is working together. It’s easy to increase delivery by for example working overtime, but that doesn’t mean that the team is more efficient as a team.

Example of a card

Most retrospectives are focused on how we can solve problems we are having, or which improvements to work on next. This is of course great, we want to improve our process and our tools. But it is equally important to spend time and energy to discuss the team itself so that members build trusts and gels as a team.

The inspiration to the cards, and the statements on the cards, are from all over the place. These are some sources: Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick M. Lencioni), Teamwork is and Individual Skill (Christopher Avery), Squad Health Check (Spotify), my colleagues at Crisp, and probably many other sources from my years as an agile coach.

Note: I would not run this exercise with a dysfunctional team that struggles to get along. Other kind of work will probably provide much higher impact and help the team to get on the right track faster (such as working on defining and uniting around clear goals, discussing and creating a working agreements, defining a process that fits the team’s needs, etc.). 

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Preparations

Download the cards, print them, and cut them out. You want one deck for each participant. Click here to download the cards.

You also need voting cards. One green, one yellow and one red card for each participant. Post-it will do great.

Note: If you are doing it as an anonymous survey you download the survey instead and asks each person to fill it in and bring it to you before the workshop or retrospective. Click here to download the survey.

If you want to create your own cards, or customize them, you can find a full list of the cards in the appendix at the end.

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Running the survey

Explain the purpose of the survey and that we can, if we want to, repeat it a couple of months into the future.

Draw a table on a whiteboard. One row per card. Five columns. Sixteen rows. See illustration to the right. As you go through the cards write down the name of the card as the cards are being drawn and voted upon.

Each card has a headline naming a characteristic of a team, and a green and a red statement. Read them out loud. Give people a couple of seconds to think. Then ask them to choose one of the voting cards. Green means that you agree with the green statement, red that you agree with the red statement. A yellow vote means that you think it’s neither green nor red but something in the middle.

At a count to three everyone reveals their vote simultaneously. Count the votes and add them to the table on the whiteboard.

If someone feels the want to discuss the votes, tell them that we first do the survey and once all cards have been voted on we continue to the next step in the exercise, which will include discussions. Tell the group that the can put aside the cards as reminder so they don’t forget to raise them for discussion later.

Once you have dotted down the votes on the whiteboard, proceed with the next question.

It shouldn’t take longer than 15-20 minutes to run through the cards, unless of course you choose to allow discussions after each card.

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Reflect and summarize

Note: If you did the survey anonymously this is where the meeting starts. Draw the table along with the votes before participants enter the room.

Before proceeding to the discussions, do a factual summary of the results. Ask people to summarize what they see. Where is the voting concurrent? Where is there a lot of green? A lot of red? Where are the votes spread all over the green-yellow-red scale? It’s much better if the participants can describe this since the insights will be theirs.

Wrap up the summary by calculating the barometer value. Green = 2, Yellow = 1, and Red = 0. Write down the average for each row. Sum all the rows together and fill in the sum in the “Barometer value” square.

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Discussion

One way to start this is to simply ask – what do we need to talk about? What do you want to share?

This is all play by ear. You will never be able to anticipate which discussions that might arise. The cards cover a broad spectrum and no matter how gelled and strong the team is there will surely be some statements or votes that trigger discussions and debate.

If the team however doesn’t seem to find where to start, and silence from your part doesn’t cut it, you could ask if anyone wants to clarify their vote somewhere or if anyone has put aside a card that they wanted to discuss after the voting.

Don’t feel pushed to facilitate the discussions so that they end in actions. These kind of topics are more about trust, feelings and motivation and aren’t always actionable. Just having the discussion can be valuable enough and have strong long-term impact on behaviour and the team’s ability to collaborate.

As an ending, ask the team if they would like to do a follow up in the future. If they do, ask how far into the future. If not, end the meeting and thank people for attending and trying out the exercise.

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Follow up

If the team wants to, schedule an invite immediately after the meeting so that it is done and you can forget about it. Make sure you document the outcome and the barometer value of the meeting. The simplest approach is probably to take a photo of the whiteboard and put in on the wiki (or mail it out to the team).

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Alternatives

Fewer cards – more discussion
If you feel you want plenty of time to discuss after each voting you might want to reduce the number of cards to five or six. Choose the one that you might think reflects the teams own values and desires best, or choose the cards that you think will spur the most interesting discussions.

Perfection game – action oriented
To turn the retrospective into a more action oriented exercise you could choose only three cards. Replace the red-yellow-green voting with a perfection game where each member places a vote on a scale 1 (red) to 10 (green) along with comments on post-its that describes what that person needs or wants to happen in order to turn his or her vote to a 10. Boil down the comments and suggestion to a couple of actionable items, prioritize them and assign action points to volunteers.

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Final note

This selection of cards, and the statements written, on them is a snapshot how I ran the exercise the last time. Every time I use them I tend to review them and fiddle around with both the number of cards and the statements written on them. I suspect that I in the future will have learned which cards spurs the best dialog and manage to reduce them to fewer than 16. I might go back and update the materials presented here, I might not.

Good luck!

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Appendix