Using agile retrospectives to iteratively improve team harmony 

In my 15+ years of technical authoring, I’ve had the privilege of working on a number of amazing teams that applied the principles of agile to their workflows. Owing to the different corporate, site, and team dynamics, each team practiced these principles differently – but we’ve always valued iterative improvements, adapting to changes within both the industry and our teams. 

My personal favourite method of discovering improvements is the agile retrospective. 

Big changes take capacity to implement, so it’s most effective if we make use of smaller, iterative improvements. These smaller changes are experiments that give us the opportunity to assess quickly whether it’s worth trying something different or continuing to improve in that direction.  

Knowing that nothing is set in stone, we use these agile retrospectives to both look at what didn’t go as well as we wanted in the previous period, but explore even small ways that we can improve our experiences in the next period. 

Creating a safe and supportive space 

Over the years, the happiest and most productive teams I’ve ever worked on were ones where everyone had the same baseline assumption: 

Each of us wants to do our best. 

If you start from this assumption then it becomes clearer that, if someone is not achieving their aims, it’s because there’s something getting in their way. Remove the blockers, and that person will be enabled to reach their full potential. 

Identifying blockers by finding the friction 

Sometimes, “blockers” don’t totally stop work, it’s friction which slows down individuals and the team. When there’s no obvious stoppage of work, it’s easy to accept the friction as “this is just how things are” and push through to keep being productive. However, pushing through (and the frustration that comes with it) leads to a decrease in team morale as well as productivity. 

How do we identify the friction as something that can be changed, if the team has spent so much time accepting it as business-as-usual? 

The agile way, of course! 

Agile retrospectives 

Whether we’ve used scrum, lean, kanban, scaled agile, or any other flavours of agile working, we’ve always converged towards retrospective-type meetings at regular intervals as the most effective way to regularly improve how we work together. 

During an agile retrospective meeting, we have time to look back at what we’ve accomplished and consider what it is that we could have done differently and what we could improve before the next retrospective. With time allocated on a regular basis, we have the space for creativity. 

But how do we run a retrospective meeting? 

A Stop, Start, and Continue retrospective board 

My favourite type of retrospective meeting uses a Stop-Start-Continue prompt in lieu of an agenda. The team enter the room with a 3-column board labelled Stop, Start, and Continue. These three words are prompts for the team to consider: 

• STOP: What do you dislike that needs to stop happening? 
• START: What do you propose we should trial, to improve how we work? 
• CONTINUE: What do you enjoy that we need to ensure we continue doing? 

The meeting attendees are armed with sticky cards and markers (or a digital equivalent) to write a single idea on each card. These ideas are stuck on the wall in the relevant column. 

After everyone has jotted down their ideas, the meeting facilitator reads out the contents of the cards one-by-one and solicits discussion about each point, beginning with the STOP cards: 

• Why is this a particular issue? 
• What’s the root cause? 
• Does anyone have a suggestion for how we could work differently so that this is less of a problem? 

After all the STOP cards are addressed, the facilitator moves onto the START cards. Some of these cards may already be proposed improvements issues raised in the STOP columns. Each START card is discussed in more detail: 

• What positive impact do we expect to come from this change? 
• Are there any issues that might arise from implementing this change? 

To wrap up the meeting, the facilitator reads out the CONTINUE cards. These cards provide the team with an opportunity to reflect on their ongoing strengths and serve as a check that the proposed changes aren’t in conflict with things that the team likes. 

An example of gathering our thoughts 

In one meeting that I’ve facilitated, several teammates wrote about the same issue with a regularly overrunning weekly client sync meeting. The meeting’s main purpose was to provide the client with a status update of the ongoing work and discuss any blockers that have arisen. 

The first card we came to read: 

Getting off-topic in the client call 

We discussed what it meant, and the team explained that our client contact was very friendly and chatty at the start of the meetings and, throughout the meeting, status updates would deviate into lengthy discussions. 

The overrunning meeting resulted in some team members being late for other meetings, and reduced budget available because time was spent in meetings instead of authoring. It was also an inefficient use of time when not all team members on the call were needed for the ad-hoc discussions. The team agreed that it should be the responsibility of the meeting host to set an agenda which the meeting should stick to. 

We wrote down an action based on this first STOP card: 

Include a rough meeting schedule in the recurring meeting invite, so that everyone knows what needs to be covered before the meeting is concluded. Update a meeting invite instance prior to the call if required. 

The next STOP card read: 

Using the client call for discovery and decision discussions 

This card was grouped together with the first card we discussed, but it prompted one team member to suggest that the meeting host should be responsible for setting up separate calls with the appropriate attendees whenever a point needed to be discussed in detail, to keep the current meeting on track. We added that to our list of actions. We also agreed that any attendee could flag up that a separate meeting would be required, if they noticed before the meeting host that the meeting was straying off topic. 

When we turned to the card in the START column, we had already addressed it!  

In-depth discussions in a different call 

We added this card to the stack of related cards. 

The only card left to address was the CONTINUE card which reminded the team that their relationship with the client was very friendly and they didn’t want that to change. The team agreed that they should speak to the client contact about adding the agenda to the meeting and how it would improve the working relationship, and to ensure that there was still some time at the beginning of the meeting for the friendly chat. 

Finding solutions 

A powerful feature of the retrospective is that it brings the whole team together to find solutions to issues both big and small, such as: 

• Some team members were not logging their time in a timely manner which impacted estimate statistics and reporting. Another team member suggested a recurring calendar event to timebox updating timesheets. 
• Knowledge was siloed with specific team members which impacted the team when those members were absent. The team agreed to schedule regular knowledge sharing sessions. 
• Priorities rapidly changed due to external factors. The team agreed to have daily stand-ups to ensure that everyone was informed about developments. 
• Our team had a document template/outline on which to base new documents, but the team preferred working from example text. The lead agreed to direct the team to specific existing pages to use as a model for new work. 
• A project contained an excess of artefacts because there had been rapid development and minimal maintenance. The team agreed to introduce a maintenance stream so that a backlog of maintenance work could be scoped, scheduled, and completed. 

A virtuous cycle 

A regularly scheduled retrospective meeting allows the team to improve how it interacts with external teams and how it functions internally. The team can note that a team member is struggling with their responsibilities, such as the meeting host who struggled to keep the meeting on task and on time, and then find ways to remove the blockers for that teammate. When the whole team can work together in an open and supportive way, everyone benefits.