Finding Marbles

The retrospective is my personal favorite among the Scrum meetings. Why? Even if there were no other meeting, role, or artefact, retrospectives enable you to invent everything else you need to improve. In theory at least.

When I was just learning how to facilitate retrospectives, I was mainly concerned about the flow of the actual meetings. I needed to gain some routine before I had freed up enough brain cycles to realize that what happens after the retro is at least as important: The whole point is to inspect and adapt, i.e. to change something. If few of the retrospectives’ action items ever get implemented and bear fruit it’s frustrating. Ultimately it leads to retrospective fatigue where teams are unwilling to participate in the retro anymore, because “What’s the point anyway? Nothing ever changes!”

So, how can you increase follow-through and make sure that more action items are carried out? As always it depends on the situation:

A – Team can’t agree on action items

If you don’t have a facilitator, get one or nurture one. If you do have a facilitator, the “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making” or a training about retrospectives (or moderation techniques) will be beneficial.

B – No one feels responsible for action items

Each action item does have a name on it, doesn’t it? In the end of each retro check all action items and ask for each unassigned one who is going to take care of it. A single task such as “Write mail to admins about monitors” also needs a deadline. Recurring tasks such as “Pair program 2 hours per day” are assigned for the whole sprint (or indefinitely until the one resonsible transfers responsibility). The duty here is to remind everyone to comply. One of my fellow scrum masters lovingly dubbed this role “Arschtrittfee” = “ass kick fairy”.

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