Team Practices Group/Retrospectives

Retrospective formats

Create a shared Google document
Review action items from last retro (5 min)
What happened (15 min)
1. Collaboratively (and silently) fill out a bullet list in the document
  1. List significant events in the time period since the last retrospective
  2. Events for individuals, for the team, for the department, for embedded teams, for the movement
2. Cluster and review the activities list
Make lists of keep/stop/start (10 min)
1. What should we stop doing
2. What should we start doing
3. What we should keep doing
Vote on top items worthy of detailed discussion (because valuable, urgent, important, fixable)
1. Everybody gets a fixed number of votes (maybe 5 to 10)
2. Vote on items by adding initials, bolded, in square brackets.
3. Example [JA]
Discuss top items
Confirm action list
Pick a facilitator for next Retro
Publish the notes
1. Facilitator reviews and redacts non-public information, non-repubishable or unattributed content, etc.
2. Facilitator invites rest of team to review, with deadline
3. Facilitator copies notes to new wiki page
  1. Page name: "Team_Practices_Group/Retrospectives/YYYY-MM-DD", where the date is the day the retrospective happened
  2. Note that strikethrough is dropped when pasting from Google docs.

NOTE: The 2015-11 retrospective was an experiment using Google Sheets