Are you in a situation where your team(s) has been practicing Agile for a while and teams are following ceremonies meticulously, but still there are no significant improvements sprint over sprint or release after release? If yes, I have some antidotes that I will share through series of blogs that you can experiment with.
One of the Agile principle is, “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”. This in a nutshell is Continuous Improvement (CI) and one of the ceremonies that assists you in implementing CI is Retrospectives.
Start with Retrospectives: Ask these questions.
- Are the retrospectives effective?
- Are the team members open & honest?
- Is there a good flow and exchange of information that is fact based that the team can relate to?
- Is enough flavor added to each retrospective to ensure that they don’t become monotonous?
- Is the facilitator neutral?
- Did the team put the action plan for the improvement areas after root causing the problems?
- Is the team taking at least one improvement idea that they are in total control of instead of relying on parties outside their team?
- Is someone within the team held accountable to ensure the improvements are put in action?
- Did the team reflect back on the improvements implemented in the retrospective that follows?
My observation as a Agile Coach has been that teams are generally very enthusiastic to begin new work as soon as current work is completed and they cut corners or miss on Retrospective entirely thereby missing on a important Agile Principle – “Inspect and Adapt”
