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Punchy, actionable insights and tips to make the life of the team leader a breeze.
[00:00:00] Pia: So you are up and running in your sprint and you've run a standup. We're going to fast forward to the end of the sprint now to look at another essential agile ceremony, the retro. I'm Pia.
[00:00:14] Dan: And I'm Dan, and this is Squadify Connects. Well, the good news is that if you've been following along with the Connects, you will already be an expert in retros as you'll have, as you'll have done many in the last 30 odd Fridays. But now it's just a question of doing it with a team.
[00:00:31] Pia: The goal of a retro is simple. It is to take the learnings in order to accelerate execution and learning. How can you do more without just working harder?
[00:00:43] Dan: Yeah, and you're probably going to have a meeting to do this, but we've also done them asynchronously, getting people to add to an online whiteboard. So let's assume you get together. You are then asked the three classic questions. What went well, what didn't go so well, and what should we do differently in future to accelerate?
[00:01:02] Pia: A key to a successful retro is that people have a voice and also feel safe to speak up. Our advice on this is give everyone a chance to reflect and have a set of points that they then share on a whiteboard or similar, so that it's not just the vocal folks like us that get a say and secondly. Keep working on that psychological safety.
[00:01:27] One of the best ways to do this is to set the tone, especially for question two, what didn't go so well? You can lead the way. Call out some things that you think you could have done better. This will enable others to feel that they can do the same.
[00:01:41] Dan: And by the way, we found that we can combine a retro and sprint planning into one monthly meeting, something you might want to think about, and you can immediately apply your learnings to the future sprint. So the first half is devoted for the retro, and then you go straight into planning the upcoming month.
[00:01:59] This week, at the very least, your action is to set up a time for the retro. But you can also do a mini mid sprint retro if you want. You're still really learning a lot about this, this approach to execution that could be useful as you're really learning how the approach works. And it'll give everyone a voice, to have a say on how to improve things as you go along.
[00:02:19] Pia: Great, so good luck on your week of collaborative execution. You now have the key elements of agile under your belt, and in the next two weeks we'll be covering some aspects of agile that really make the team hum. See you next week.