Today our team had a wonderful retrospective. The topic to be addressed was “Is retrospective useful or useless” [that is why I call this retrospective wonderful]
A little background: I have not been attending team retrospectives for quite a while and I had this concern on its effectiveness, based on what I hear during coffee break chats as well as through grapevines.
When the retrospective started, we started with question “Is it USEFULL or USELESS?”, the team members were little puzzled. They were not sure what needs to be said. Initially 2 members, responded that retrospective were very useful. This prompted me to give reassurance/reminder to team members that the purpose of retrospectives is to identify areas of improvements and as long as we do not open up the weak spots, we stay where we are. We need to do something different, lest we continue making same old mistakes. The outcome would be same as earlier sprints. This clicked and slowly team members started opening up. Below gives a summary on what did not work in earlier retrospectives.
1. Team members were hesitant to talk freely
2. Discussion concluded without actions (at least a majority felt so)
3. Identified actions were not acted upon
4. Even when actions were taken, these were not tracked to closure
5. All stakeholders were not aware of what had happened to earlier actions
It was clearly evident that there was a total lack of TRUST among team members. Team members felt there was no use raising area of concerns, since there were not going to be any results. Yet another area that was lacking was adequate communication. When team members are not clear on specific actions taken, it clearly shows a complete lack of adequate communication.
Now, it is action time to bring back the lost trust as well as better means of communication. I will keep posting J
No comments:
Post a Comment