Scrum Metaphor: Retro as Family Meeting

Retro is one of the most important ceremonies in scrum framework. In retro team members should speak freely without any fear of retribution and judging. Retro is like Family Meeting.

As name suggests, in family meeting only family members are allowed to participate, who can watch the back of each other. Similarly, in retro only team members who can back up each other ( devTeam) and Scrum Master ( after all he is a servant leader for the team) and Product Owner (is your PO part of the family?) should participate. Like family meeting, retro should be conducted in a closed-door environment where everyone expresses his or her opinion, grievances can share freely without fear of judgment by others.

In a family meeting, family can discuss a lot of things but family may decide to share few selective bits of information with the external world, so the retro. In the family meeting, all is discussed – good, bad, and worst. Family decides what to share with the external world but family work as collective to improve overall capability of the family.

Family meeting works like a mirror to family and helps family members to remain trustworthy to each other and become better over time.

An experiment – Emotion graph

I am planning to have an experiment in retro to understand how team felt during sprint. I am calling this experiment as Emotion Graph. In this experiment in the end of retro, on white board, I intend to draw a graph similar to below picture:

In this picture, x-axis will originate from sprint planning meeting and end with retro. The y-axis will represent the happiness on +ve side of axis while –ve side will depict unhappiness of the team. Happiness as well as unhappiness will just be labels, so can be replaced by other labels like elated, nervous, etc.

Now team will write down major events on the x-axis. Now picture may look like:

 

 

Now each team member may draw a curved line to depict his emotional state (between happy and not happy) during sprint. Once every one drew his curved line, team starts to discuss why they felt happy or unhappy at that particular event.

I suppose this exercise will help team to understand itself better.

Please share if you have performed similar exercise, your views and outcome of it.

 

Causes of low participation in retro

Few observations, I have made during my agile journey which affect participation in retro:

• Fear of retribution
• Name calling during/after retro
• Cultural background
• Command on spoken language of team ( especially important in multi-cultural teams)
• Understanding of Agile/Scrum
• Presence of non-scrum team members during retro
• Few persons are overwhelming to others
• Sub groups within teams (especially language, ethnic, and vendor/employer based)
• Personal nature (introvert vs. extrovert

To optimize the participation and outcome of retro, you need to find out the cause of lack of participation.

 

One solution which has worked for my team in most of cases is food sharing, not necessarily in a restaurant but in office cafeteria, meeting room and even regular pot luck.

Last but not the least, SM and PO need to give time to team. SM is a resident coach to team.

What are your views?

Scrum Retrospective – What about best practices and learning from success?

As per Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:

• Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
• Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
• Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.

But Scrum Guide is silent about on How?

The question of how become more important as scale of Scrum Agile increases in an enterprise.

To answer one part of How – “How and why something worked well?” Fu Pan might be an answer.

Fu Pan concept has its origin in Lenovo and widely supported by its chairman Liu Chuanzhi. The idea is to intentionally slow down and analyze events - both successes and failures - in order to learn from them and move ahead at a faster pace.

Goal:  What had you originally set out to do?

Measure results: What have you achieved and is it what you set out to do?

Brainstorm: Find outcomes, highlights and lowlights of the final result

Analysis: Get to the root cause of why the outcomes were achieved

Insights: Learnings based on the analysis. Determine what to replicate in the future, what behaviors to start, stop and continue

I am planning to use Fu Pan during Retrospective and also at Program level.

Any ideas, pointers?

Reference:

1. http://www.fastcompany.com/1793529/protect-and-attack-lenovos-new-strategy
2. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-03-14/news/48222472_1_lenovo-india-tent-mode-exclusive-showrooms
3. http://adamdawood.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/lenovos-strategy-2011