The True North of a Retro Session

This is one of the back to basic scrum articles that I’m going to write every so often. Today I’m going to talk about the point of a retro session. A lot of the time I noticed that scrum practitioners simply run retro sessions without understanding the right objectives.

Retro facilitation is not about coming up with the most fun, unique, crazy ways to do retro. Yes it helps to have different facilitation techniques (I’ll talk about that some other time), but that is not the point of a retro. This session is also not the place to rant or to do some bash fest on the things that the team does not like. Too many times I have seen a retro session turned into a complain session.

In order to go back on track it’s important to remember that the point of a retro is to learn from the previous 2 weeks or a sprint, then come up with ways to continuously improve the team. Of course it’s important to surface the problems, but the team must always take their emotions out of the retro. Everything must be viewed objectively so that together the team can come up with actionable items to improve the team. In addition, there must be the will to learn and improve from each individuals.

I said actionable items because not everything is actionable from the team level. If the team comes up with an action item that is bigger than Ben Hur, such as changing the entire organisational process then we must use our lean technique and slice that action item. Perhaps there are smaller actionable items which can move the team towards that bigger goal.

Once actionable items have been defined, it’s important to actually action them within the next 2 weeks. This will provide good momentum for the team thus enabling them to continuously improve.

Simply put, i like to think that a retro session is a chance for the team to look at their compass so that they can go back into the right direction towards continuous improvement.

Remember that the point of the retro is to work towards continuous improvements using actionable items. Avoid focusing on the facilitation techniques too much and avoid the rants.