How to conduct a retrospective in Scrum?

The retrospective means you don’t have to be perfect when starting Scrum.

I’ve seen many teams delay Scrum because they want to figure everything out and have it perfect before they begin. While I admire a commitment to excellence, your team will learn Scrum best by practicing it. You will make mistakes and will need to make adjustments. But in Scrum, this is built into the process. 

The retrospective isn’t focused on the work being done; it’s focused on the team

Scrum assumes things need to change. Agility is a core feature. When you consider the core concepts of Scrum, you want to make things visible so they can be evaluated and then adapted as needed. The retrospective is a crucial moment for the team to practice this. 

The retrospective isn’t focused on the work being done; it’s focused on the team. The team sets aside the time to review how they are performing. They look at their relationship, their processes and their tools. 

The retrospective prioritizes effectiveness over efficiency by allocating time and focusing on evaluating and adapting. The team may discover how they can communicate or collaborate better. They may identify a gap in their definition of done or their current backlog refinement process. There might be a critical skill missing from the team, and during the retrospective, they identify what needs to be done and make a plan for it. 

In seven habits of highly effective people, Franklin Covey talks about the importance of sharpening the saw. The retrospective sharpens the saw for the Scrum team. They improve their process, skills, and collaboration by making their work visible, honestly evaluating it, and making the needed adjustments.

Because the Scrum team does this at the end of every sprint, you don’t have to get it perfect before you start. Are you debating between a one or two-week sprint? Pick one and have the team evaluate the cadence after the first few sprints. Not sure if having the Standup in the morning or afternoon is better. Pick one and let the team assess and adapt.

It may take a few sprints for the team to realize they have the agency to make these adjustments. But once they do, it will be incredibly empowering, and you begin to see an environment where innovation can thrive.

Outline an easily repeatable process for you to run a Scrum retrospective.

Communicating open and honest feedback is essential to healthy communication. Unfortunately, it's not a ubiquitous skill and will likely need some cultivating on your Scrum team. 

Here are three strategies you can use to help you facilitate a compelling retrospective.

1. Provide pre-work to help the Scrum team reflect on the experience of the sprint.
2. Set ground rules for healthy, productive communication.
3. Use activities to facilitate the conversation.

Provide pre-work to help the Scrum team reflect on the experience of the sprint.

People are different, some are internal processors, and some are external. Some want to know what will happen ahead of time, and others just take it as it comes. Many people need a little prep to help them effectively engage in the retrospective.

This reality is especially true if you have a new Scrum team. Over time, the team will have the benefit of trust built from many healthy retros. But at the beginning, they may be coming from less than healthy teams and feeling unsure about this new one. 

Part of the scrum master’s role is to help the team learn and practice Scrum. The retrospective is a crucial part. The scrum master can send out communication 2-3 days before the retro explaining the process and providing some questions to help prompt team members to reflect on the sprint. The day before the retro, at the end of the Standup, they can verbally remind the team and reference their already set communication.

It might look something like this.

Hey, team. Friday, we will have our first retro together. It’s a time for us to pause and reflect on how things are going, how we’re working together and identify steps we can take to get even better. Here are a couple of questions you can consider to help you prepare for the time.

• How did the sprint go regarding people, relationships, processes and tools
• What went well?
• Where could we potentially improve?

Set ground rules for healthy, productive communication

Not everyone has experience giving and receiving beneficial feedback. It can be helpful to set some communication ground rules, especially for a new team. Here are a few examples to get you started:

• Don’t interrupt or talk over one another.
• Use “I statements” rather than “you statements.”
• Remember, we’re trying to improve, not blame.

The Scrum master could send these out ahead of time or introduce them at the beginning of the first retro to help the team learn. The team can even evaluate and adapt these ground rules as they need. In Scrum, everything can be agile.

Use activities to facilitate the conversation.

A little structure can help provide the safety to get the conversation started. Here are a couple of classic retro games your Scrum team can use to help facilitate the discussion.

Mad, Sad, Glad: 

Outline three spaces to put stickies notes in. 

1. What made you mad? 
2. What made you sad? 
3. What made you glad?

Write your experiences from the sprint, 1 per note, and place them on the board in the related category. Let everyone do it individually. Once they’re done, ask if anyone wants to explain their note or ask questions about someone else’s note.

Liked, learned, lacked, and longed for

This activity is the same concept as mad, sad, glad, just with different categories. Each member writes out their sprint experience. 

• What did you like?
• What did you learn?
• What was lacking as a team?
• What do you long for on the team?

Start, Stop, Continue

One more category activity. This one is probably the most simple. Team members share their sprint experience through three questions.

• What should we start doing?
• What should we stop doing?
• What should we continue doing?

ROI timeline

This one is a little different. You draw a horizontal line across a board to represent the timeline of the sprint. The left is the beginning of the sprint the right is the end. Above the line are positive experiences; below the line are negative ones. 

The team then uses sticky notes to capture their experiences or observations and places them horizontally according to when during the sprint they happened and vertically according to whether they were positive or negative. Place more positive experiences higher, further above the line and more negative ones lower.

You can even use some of the questions from these other games to help prompt the team as they think about the sprint. 

This exercise helps the team visually see the sprint as it unfolded. Sometimes this visual representation of time uncovers a causal relationship providing the team with insight into why things went the way they did. The team can then identify how they will improve.

Taking the Retrospective to the next Sprint

You’ve finished the retrospective, and there is greater visibility into how the team is working. You’ve evaluated and identified both strengths to build on and improvement areas. How do you apply this understanding to help the team adapt and grow?

Change in how the team operates

• Maybe the timing of the daily scrum is a problem for some team members. Go ahead and reschedule it to a better time beginning in the next sprint.
• Does the definition of done need to be updated for an additional quality check. Add it now before ending the meeting.

Change to the work the team will do

• Is a new skill needed on the team to effectively do the necessary work?  Create an internal user story for the following sprint to allocate the time required. 
• Is there a process that needs to be redesigned for effective collaboration? Decide which upcoming sprint to add a user story for this work.

In both of these cases, don’t wait to begin making changes. If the team seems unsure of the adjustment to make, then consider the next sprint an experiment to try out an alternative. It’s essential for the team to take the insights gained from the retro and create a plan to improve how they work together.

I hope this article provided helpful guidance for running efficient and effective Scrum retrospective sessions. If you want to learn more about Scrum in general, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

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