Try A Festive Agile Retrospective!

Christmas is approaching and you're coming to the end of your sprint... why not capitalise on the season of goodwill and hold a festive themed agile retrospective!

In order to keep things nice and simple for you, I am going to use my favoured template to help lead and shape the discussion. For those who aren't familiar, I like to use the following from "Agile Retrospectives - Making Good Teams Great".

• Set The Scene
• Gather Data
• Generate Insights
• Decide What To Do
• Close Retrospective

I'd love to hear how you get on with this retrospective, how the team reacted and how it helped or hindered the discussion! Leave a comment with how it went!

Festive Retrospective!

You will need:

• Post it notes
• Whiteboard/flipchart
• Whiteboard/marker pens
• Planning poker cards

Highly recommended/optional:

• Festive playlist - load your phone with a selection of Christmas songs to help manage the time during activities. I like to limit activities to the length of "x" amount of songs. Personal favourite Christmas songs of mine are Merry Christmas Everyone by Shakin' Stevens and the Michael Buble Christmas album!
• Christmas treats - As mentioned in previous posts, the retrospective is cause for a celebration and a valuable chance to build the culture of the team. I always recommend bringing in sweets or chocolates. As it's Christmas, take advantage of the mince pies on offer in the supermarkets, or if you're feeling brave, bake your own (providing there are no health and safety issues...)!
• Christmas jumpers - Why not?!

Set The Scene - Festive Foodies!

This is my favourite, fun way to start a retrospective. I like my teams to come up with a metaphor to describe the sprint. In previous retrospectives I have used food, drinks, movies, songs, countries, I haven't yet found one that doesn't work. I've even managed to get this to work with teams based in India, where I was worried that this exercise may become lost in translation!

Give the team a few moments to think of a festive food that best describes the sprint just gone. Each person should do this individually. Get each team member to write it on a post it and stick it to the board. Then, go round the team one by one and get them to explain their Festive food and why the sprint relates to that. 

You might want to give an example like:

A tin of Quality Street - The sprint has been great, with lots of variety and interesting stuff going on. However, I picked out a "toffee penny" of a user story that's full of issues...

Gather Data - He's Making A List, Checking It Twice...

Now that the team are warmed up, in good spirits and onto their second mince pie, we need to get to the bottom of their metaphors by thinking about some of the events that occurred during the sprint.

Ask the team to think about some of the events that happened in the last sprint and categorise them into two columns:

"The Naughty List" and "The Nice List".

"The Naughty List" should contain all of the bad, frustrating, annoying and generally unfortunate things that occurred during the sprint. This could be anything from poorly defined stories, build issues, lack of knowledge etc.

"The Nice List" should contain all of the good things that occurred during the sprint!

Use the Post It notes to compile the list!

I'd recommend giving the team the length of 2 to 3 songs worth of time to compile the list.

Once this is done, get each person to read out their events of the sprint, explaining why each is either naughty, or nice!

Generate Insights - Santa's Sleigh

Now that as a team we have learned a little bit more about the sprint, it's time to do something about it! Let's use the idea of Santa's Sleigh.

All of the items on the Naughty List are weighing Santa's Sleigh down, causing his productivity on Christmas Eve to struggle. These are his presents. If we can somehow remove, or deliver his presents, his Sleigh will fly a little more smoothly, causing him to be more productive.

The items on the Nice List however, are helping to pull Santa's Sleigh along. These are his trusty reindeer! How can we do more of things on the Nice List, or do them better? Think of this as adding a reindeer to the sleigh. 

Using the Naughty and Nice lists as a reference, ask each team member to come up with 1 idea to deliver presents (tackle an item on the naughty list) and 1 idea to add a reindeer (maximise the nice list).

Again, limit this to a number of songs and get each team member to explain their idea to the team!

Decide What To Do - North Pole Dollars

Now in order to keep the number of action points to take into the next sprint manageable, we need to decide as a team which we would like to focus on.

To do this, the team needs to come to a collective agreement. I have tried many ways to quickly, fairly and efficiently do this, but find that dot voting or a twist on relative estimation is the best. As we did a twist on dot voting in my last themed retrospective, lets go with relative estimation this time.

Hand out your Planning Poker cards to each team member. Ask the team to quickly decide which improvement would be the least valuable to the team. Once this is decided, the team should estimate this by holding up a card. 

Take an average based on the estimation,so if the team hold up a 1, 3, 1, 5 and a 13, then the average is 23/5= 4.6. Multiply this average by 1000 to give you your value.

For added fun you can assign a monetary value to this, say North Pole Dollars. Therefore this improvement has a value to the team of NP$4,600. I first used this idea of assigning fictitious currency when doing my ScrumMaster certification training and found it fun and a great way to help prioritise!

Using this item as a frame of reference, ask the team to assign values through planning poker to all the remaining improvements and collate a leader board (from highest value to least) for them all.

Once you have finished, the top 3 improvements are the most valuable to the team and the ones to be carried into the next sprint! Make sure that you don't forget to assign the responsibility of looking after each action to someone and agree on the next steps!

Close Retrospective - Secret Santa

By now, you should have some actions to take into the next sprint. It's time to end the retrospective with a little fun! 

Anonymously, ask each team member to write a name of a team member who had the most positive impact on the sprint (no cheating and writing your own name here!). If they can also think of a reason (that doesn't give their identity away) too, write that down as well.

Then, fold the notes and pop them in a bag for the ScrumMaster to draw out. One by one, draw the notes reading out the name and reason! This should give the team a boost, an opportunity to show some appreciation and have some fun too!

If you're team doesn't like the idea of this (I find some software teams don't like some of this hippy "feel good" stuff), you can always instigate a game of Christmas charades!

Have a go at introducing some festive cheer into your next retrospective and remember to let me know how you get on!

An Agile Letter To Santa!

Wouldn't it be great if Santa Claus was more agile? I mean, by now we all know that it is crazy to work for 364 days a year and then do a delivery within a 24 hour period! Wizard definitely had the right idea, wishing that it could be Christmas everyday! Working in shorter, 1 day sprints, Santa and his team could have more chance to stop, reflect and improve. Plus, his clients would get the added benefit of getting value, enjoying Christmas everyday!

Putting Santa's waterfall approach aside, today is a month till Christmas day and it is about time that we put an agile letter to Santa together (let's just hope that we haven't changed our minds as I don't think that Santa and the elves can cope with change this late in the game).

I have been thinking of some of the things, products and artefacts that have made agile teams that I work with successful over the years. I have put them into a nice list for you, in order for you and your team to pick and choose the ones that you want to add to your list!

Toys are an important part of our day to day work...

Here goes...

Dear Santa,

My agile team and I have been really well behaved this year, been responsive to change, open minded, value focused and committed to continual improvement. With that in mind, please can we have:

1. A huge 60" TV - If you haven't already read it, read my post on "How To Justify a 60" TV To Your Boss". It explains in detail why I love the benefits that a large TV can bring to your agile team... Really!
2. More whiteboards - Whiteboards have transformed how we work at McKenna Consultants. We use them to; draw wire frames, discuss ideas, make lists, come up with technical architecture, stick things to it, display the World Cup sweepstakes and even as a kanban board before we went digital! There are many more ways to utilise a whiteboard in your office. We cover every spare metre of wall space with them! Just remember to photograph any moment of brilliance before a colleague comes along and wipes the board clean!
3. A JIRA subscription - We started to use JIRA for our digital kanban around 18 months ago and have never looked back since. It is easy to use and great for managing our backlog. We use it in its simplest form as we find that the more you customise and restrict it, the more that the team becomes bound by it!
4. Planning poker cards - A staple of any agile team. If you're not already relatively estimating, start now. It's easy to do and you will be amazed at how accurate over time your estimates become! If you don't want to buy them... make your own!
5. Books - CPD is a big part of what we do at McKenna Consultants and it's something that we actively encourage the team to do. We have a shared Kindle account and Amazon account enabling anyone at any time to buy or download a book that they need! In a bigger organisation? Why not start a CPD book club, or in a smaller team, each member do a show and tell on a book they've read each sprint! Just try to avoid any titles starting with 50 shades... Some of our favourite books can be found on our training references list.
6. ElfKit Festive Fitness Advent Calendar app - Who loves counting the days to Christmas with an advent calendar? We certainly do, that's why we have made a couple of Christmas advent calendar apps, free for you to download now! Check them out and spread a little festive joy around the office!
7. Scrum ball - I like to keep my teams on their toes - especially in the daily stand up. I introduced a mini rugby ball as a symbol to determine who's turn it is to speak. Once a team member has finished, they throw it to who they want to hear from next. Only the person with the ball can speak. When the stand up is finished, the person with the ball has the responsibility of starting tomorrow's stand up. This game makes it fun (there is a certain amount of heckling when someone drops the ball), and encourages everyone to pay attention and LISTEN!
8. Microsoft Surface 3 - Transform the way you work with one of these nifty little machines. Our CEO Nick has recently moved to this as his work and on the go machine. He has even spared the time to blog a couple of times about it here, and here. 
9. Video camera - During a CPD book show and tell, a team member shared an insight into a book about User Story Mapping. The author suggested that you record discussions around requirements, or as we call them at McKenna Consultants, "User Story Workshop" or "Story Time". The benefits of this is amazing. These discussions can often become detailed, enthusiastic, interesting and key to the product. But if the team is not immediately going off to work on this, some key insights can be forgotten. We found that by recording these short, snappy discussions, we can watch them back and recap on any decisions and suggestions made. It also provides a great talking point for a retrospective! (Which are also great to record!).
10. Toys! - No software development team is complete without some toys! We have Ironman, a Plant of the Apes monkey head, R2D2, lightsabres, an Xbox One... We try to find some downtime now and then to make the office fun and to foster creative thoughts.
11. Coffee machine - The Tassimo in our office is probably the hardest working member of the team. It's not because the rest of the team doesn't work hard, just that we drink a lot of coffee. No one likes rubbish coffee, so don't buy your team and guests it!
12. Dedicated PO - Finally, the thing that all agile teams want for Christmas, a dedicated, pro-active Product Owner. You can have the most highly skilled software development team in the world, with a weak Product Owner and you are likely to build a really good, but ultimately WRONG product. However, with an average development team and a strong Product Owner, you are more likely to build the RIGHT product... eventually! Imagine what you could do with a great team and a great Product Owner. We have coached, trained and mentored numerous Product Owners and find that once this is nailed, the team almost instantly becomes more focused, more productive and happier!

So that's my Christmas wishlist for you and your teams, see how you can make the most of some of these things! Maybe you could adapt this to a themed retrospective, or wait patiently for next week's blog post... 

Retrospective Theme Idea - Spooky Sprint!

Happy Halloween!

I mentioned in my previous blog some tips for running a great retrospective. I am going to now expand on some of those ideas by giving you an insight into one of my themed retrospectives. Now as it is 31st October and the spookiest day of the year, this retrospective is going to embrace Halloween (we never too old, right?)!

So here are some ideas for you to play with if you are running a retrospective any time soon...

Spooky Sprint Retrospective!

As mentioned in my previous blog posts, I like to use a template from "Agile Retrospectives - Making Good Teams Great" to help guide my retrospectives, and this one is no different. The steps are:

• Set The Scene
• Gather Data
• Generate Insights
• Decide What To Do
• Close Retrospective

If you are unfamiliar with this approach, I recommend getting the book or having a trawl on the net, as I am going to jump straight into the good stuff!

You will need:

• Post it notes
• Whiteboard/flip chart
• Whiteboard/marker pens

Set The Scene - Halloween Treats!

I like to start retrospectives in a fun way to get the team warmed up and relaxed. I do this by using a Sprint Metaphor. Set the team the task to come up with a Halloween treat that best describes how the sprint went. This can be any piece of Halloween chocolate, sweets or confectionery. You might want to give the team an example like:

Haribo (Other sweets are available!) Tangfastics - The sprint has been generally productive and enjoyable, but the build issues that we have en counted during the sprint have left a really sour taste in my mouth!

Give the team a few moments to think of one each, then get them to write it on a post it and stick it to the board. Then, go round the team one by one and get them to explain their Halloween treat and why the sprint relates to that. 

Gather Data - Ghost Stories!

Now we know how the team feels following the sprint, it time to think about why. To do this, ask each team member to come up with a ghost story for the team. This can have a happy or a scary (sad) ending, but should cover the events that went on during the sprint.

Try to encourage the team by making it fun along the way!

Once each team member has their ghost story ready, get them one by one to tell it to the team!

Generate Insights - Trick or Treat!

Now comes the real crooks of the retrospective - coming up with some great ideas for improvement. To do this, use the idea of Trick or Treating.

Draw up two sections on the board, one for Trick, and one for Treat. Then ask each team member to stick one idea of a new idea to improve the team by as little as 1% in the Treat section, and one idea to eradicate an issue in the Trick column. These ideas should flow from the discussion in the earlier activities.

For example, a Treat may be: Let's start estimating using relative story points. And a Trick may be: Leaving testing to the end of the sprint is causing us so many issues, let's try doing this as we develop each story.

Once the team have come up with one idea in each, ask them to explain each point. At this point the discussion should be allowed to flow and the ScrumMaster (or whoever is running the retrospective) should be helping the team to capture the ideas being raised.

Decide What To Do - Pick a Door!

Now that the team has come up with an abundance of ideas, try to group the ones that are the same (or very similar) and number them all as doors.

The team will now have a number of options to choose to improve. For a team of 8 people, there could be up to 16 ideas.

Get the team to imagine the scenario that they are out Trick or Treating and only have time to visit three more houses. They can choose to visit three separate ones, the same one three times, or one house once, and another one twice. The team member cannot visit their own house (idea).

Get the team to then put one dot per visit to the door that they wish to visit. For a team of 8 people, there should be 24 dots distributed across the doors. Count up the visits on each door, pick the top 3 and there you have your 3 improvements to take forward into the next sprint, as decided by the team.

At this point it is usually wise to allocate these to specific team members and clarify what the next actions are to achieve this (it may be as simple as writing a user story up on the backlog).

Close Retrospective - Spook of the Sprint!

Now I always like to finish the sprint on a high note, so I like to play a little game, for this retrospective, Spook of the Sprint.

Ask each team member to go round the room and thank one team member for something they have done during the sprint. I usually don't let team members thank each other! Total up the votes, see who has the most and there you go, you have a Spook of the Sprint! Celebrate with a round of applause, or the presentation of a team mascot to have on their desk for the next sprint.

Try this to end the retrospective, it's amazing how good people feel as a result of it!

Other Ideas

Play Music - Rather than the team sitting in silence whilst they are thinking, give them a length or one, two or three songs. As it's a Halloween theme, think Thriller (the shorter radio version!), Rocky Horror Show or Ghostbusters!

Halloween Treats - Stick some sweets in the middle of the table, it's the end of the sprint, your team deserves it!

Dress Up - Why not go full Halloween on this? (Maybe not)

Now this kind of retrospective may seem a little abstract or off the wall, and believe me, I have had many a strange look by teams experiencing my themed retrospectives for the first time. BUT, do not worry! I promise you that running run, innovate retrospective like this will not only generate great, innovative ideas, but will also improve the bond within your team.

Give it a go!

I Love Agile Retrospectives!

I absolutely love nothing more than running Agile retrospectives. It is my thing. It's the meeting that I look forward to most with every software team that I work with.

I run retrospectives for my team at McKenna Consultants, for teams that we work with on software development projects and for teams that we are coaching. I've run retrospectives for multiple teams. I also coach my clients to run them. I have even encouraged my girlfriend to run them for her team, in an industry totally different to technology! That is how much I love Agile retrospectives (geeky I know).

I get a real buzz from watching the conversation and discussion develop and new ideas growing from these. Here are 10 tips on how I like to run my retrospectives:

1. Firstly, you have to do them (or at least have a mechanism for change embedded in your team) in order to be Agile.
2. I prefer doing them on a Friday afternoon. It's the end of a usually busy week, Friday afternoon is the time to get together as a team, have some fun and get some ideas out.
3. They need to be fun. Yes, FUN. Believe it or not it is allowed! I like to make them fun by running themes throughout. Below are some pictures of some of the themed retrospectives that I have been apart of. I have done themes of the World Cup, Wimbledon and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Star Wars! The key is finding a theme that is a) relevant; and b) is a shared interest amongst your team. 

   

   Wimbledon Retrospective Complete With Strawberry and Cream Cakes!

   
   

   

   World Cup 2014 Retrospective!

4. Get out of the office. Put your tools down and go to a local cafe, park (if weather permits) or down the pub. If you get outside your usual workplace then the ideas will really start to flow! Warning: If you choose to go to the pub for your retrospective, it is generally a good idea not to have an alcoholic drink!
5. Play music. Get the team to relax, use the music to fill any quiet moments when the team are thinking.
6. Make it visual. It's no good sat around staring at your notebooks. Prepare handouts. Use a whiteboard. Drag your kanban in. Get creative.
7. Read Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. I love the structure to retrospectives that they suggest. It provides a great platform for me to go on and tailor my retrospectives to the team.
8. Get some inspiration from other books like Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann. You'll be amazed at how many ideas that you can get and adapt to provide value to your team.
9. Bring Food. People like food, simple. I'm not talking about a 3 course meal, some buns, tin of chocolates or bag of sweets is enough.
10. Make sure that you leave the meeting with some actions that are followed up on. Fun is important, but you need to make sure that you and the team create value from it.

To help you come up with some retrospective themes, I will post some ideas from time to time on here, let me know how you get on!

Here's to continual improvement and happy "retrospecting"!