Best Online Retrospective for Beginners

- How can you run online retrospectives that are fun and effective? At the end of 2020, a lot of teams are still figuring out their online way of working. How can you collaborate with each other without all the meetings and build more flexibility in your day? The Workshop Wednesday community helps you to run high energy and results-driven workshops so that you can take back control over your work.

And online retrospectives are a great way to improve your team's effectiveness and happiness. So let's go. Retrospectives are a great way to see what went well and what still can be improved on a project. But the problem is that most retrospectives are only done at the end of a project when it's too late to fix anything.

You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. This way you will find and fix problems that will help your team today. A great book that will help you get started with agile retrospectives is called dadada, Agile Retrospectives. It's written by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. The book will give you many examples and a structured approach on how to run agile retrospectives.

And an important part is this part of the book. And it's about the five phases of an agile retrospective. There are five phases; setting the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do and closing the retro. And this may sound a bit overwhelming or scary maybe even. But actually, retrospectives are quite fun and easy to run once you get the hang of it.

To help you get started, I created the Google slides template which you can copy today to run your first online retrospective. Become a member of the Workshop Wednesday community at workshopwednesday. co. And you will receive the template in your inbox today. And with this link, you can also download the PowerPoint or PDF version of this template.

I will run through the workshop step-by-step but first let's give credit where credit is due because this plan in the retrospective workshop that we follow is made by Corinna Baldauf. And she created the website called Retromat. And Retromat is a great, it's actually quite famous in the small niche of retrospective facilitators.

What it does, it shows you a number of exercises you can do in the different stages of the retrospective. So for example, for setting the stage, if you load the website, then it shows a random exercise and you can browse through the exercises. In this way you can come up with inspiration for your next retrospective.

But a warning though, don't just start with the random plan that the website generates for you. If you're looking for inspiration for your next retrospective, then start with random one and then see if it's a good fit for your team situation at that time. And browsing through these too, this is great for more experienced facilitators but if you're gonna do your first retrospective, it can maybe feel a bit overwhelming.

And that's why Corinna created the best retrospective for beginners. And actually this is the workshop outline that we copied to the template. So if you look here at the agenda, you see five topics, positive and true until aha and these topics come directly out of this retro template. So positive and trues over here and aha is the last exercise.

So let's go through the exercises one by one, and let's start with the first one; positive and true. And the goal of this exercise is to create a positive five. And you want to give everyone an opportunity to speak because if they speak at the beginning of the retrospective then the chances that they will speak later in the workshop are bigger.

There's a time box of five minutes for this exercise. And what you want is that everyone in the team comes up with a question that is tailored to get a response that is positive, true, and about someone owns experiences. So for example, what have you done really well in the last iteration, the last two weeks?

Or what is something that makes you really happy? Everyone in the team has a minute or two in silence, where they can think of a question and they can write down their question in their own workspace. Everyone has their own workspace. This is mine, this is Corinna's, Timon's. And this way you have some time to reflect, write it down and then often a minute's up, ask people to copy the post-it and to put it down on the slide.

And then you can put all the questions over here and go through them one by one and ask everyone to answer one of these questions. The next step in the retrospective is the learning metrics. And the goal of this step is to get our topics to talk about and also to appreciate your teammates, and the topics look like this.

What do we wanna continue? What do you wanna change? Do you have any new ideas for the team? And who do we want to appreciate? And you want to invite the team again to silently write their ideas in their own workspace. One thought per idea. And then after the time's up then copy the stickies one by one.

Usually, I set a timer for four to five minutes for the first part. So where everyone writes for themselves and then I set another timer for the second part. And while the post-its are being put on the board, then your facilitator will actively listen. And if you see that there is overlap or that there's a certain topic, those stickies then you will cluster them.

And then in a really short amount of time you got lots of ideas to talk about but you cannot solve everything at once. So the next step is to focus on the topics you want to discuss today in the rest of this session. And you can do that really easily by making use of dot voting, in this case, everyone has five votes.

So I want to copy and paste these votes to this slide. And now I can place them next to the topics I want to talk about today. So let's for example say, I find it really important to talk about this topic. Then I can place three votes next to it. I also wanna talk shortly about this topic and maybe also how we can learn from this success.

So it's up to the team, how they use their phones. The next step is a lean coffee which is a personal favorite workshop of mine because you don't need any preparation. And it helps to have more focused discussions. What we're gonna do is we're gonna copy the issues with the most votes from the previous exercise.

So we're gonna copy these three post-its in this case and we're gonna put them in the squares over here. Usually, you have more topics to talk about than the time you have available, if that's the case for your team, then put them in the parking lot. It helps to really park the other topics because you cannot solve everything at once.

And this keeps the topics and the discussions here more focused and direct. And the next step is simple. Let's just talk about one topic at a time. You have a time box of 10 minutes per topic. And it's important that you, as a facilitator write down suggestions based on the lean coffee discussions. This way you capture the insights from the group and you write them down as suggestions so that they can later reflect on their own discussions and make a choice on what our next step would be.

I will show you how that looks like in a bit but also it's important to keep the time box, 10 minutes per topic. And once the time is up, then go to this slide and ask the team, if they wanna continue with this topic, do with thumbs up, and then make sure that everyone can see it in the call. Or if you wanna go to the next topic, then thumbs down.

And if the majority is thumbs up then you continue for five more minutes. And otherwise, you go to the next topic. Try to keep this part of the workshop to a maximum of 30 minutes. If you spend more than 30 minutes, you'll probably come up with more ideas than you can handle in the next sprint. In the fourth step, we're gonna decide what to do.

And in this case, we are gonna do it with worked well do differently. It's pretty simple. There are two boxes. What worked well and what can we do differently? And in the previous step I asked the facilitator to already capture suggestions here. So usually you have a number of suggestions here available.

In this case, we have two. And when we get to this part of the workshop, I asked the team to reflect on those suggestions and then for themselves in silence, write down their own suggestions. And it's important to state that these are just suggestions and we will follow it in the next step which ones we're actually gonna do.

But usually for the step, you also want a short discussion, not too long. So it's up to you as a facilitator to decide how long you want to keep this running. It depends a bit on how much time you want to give for this step, but usually there's a hard deadline at the end of the meeting. So depending on that, decide how much time you want to invest.

And also remember here that you cannot solve everything at once. So you first want to get an idea of the possible solutions and the next step we're gonna vote. And we're gonna vote with three dots in this case. So copy paste them again, go to previous slide. And everyone puts them next to the solutions which they think are the most valuable for the team.

And they are the 20% beneficial ideas. So we don't want to solve everything at once. Focus on the top 20%. And again, we're gonna copy the ones with the most votes, and we're gonna move to the next part. And we place them in these boxes. And these are your action items for the next sprint. You are experiments to improve, make sure they are specific and actionable, measurable.

And also make sure that you have a way to follow up in the next retro, and help the team remind what iterative and incremental means by this quote from James Clear, "When making plans, think big. When making progress think small. " Visualize Value has a great image of the steps you need to take to achieve the big plans.

And then the fifth and last step. What are the aha moments of the team during the retrospective? So what did they learn and how do they look at it on a return of time invested. First, ask the team to put their name in one of the circles and then choose a smiley that represents their current mode. So in this case, I'm pretty okay.

And when everyone has done that, then you can pass around the ball and you as the facilitator can start by pointing out the first one. So in this case Timon. Timon answers the question, what did you learn is retrospective. And Arthur he answered the question, he will pass the ball on to someone else.

In this case, it might be worth to investigate why Corinna is not happy. If anything is still bugging someone at the end of the meeting, then you should invite them to feel free to speak up. And hopefully, you created an environment where they actually feel free enough to do so. And that's the end of the workshop.

If you want to download this workshop, then sign up today for the Workshop Wednesday community. You can go to workshopwednesday. co and sign up there, and you will receive the Google slides template into your inbox. You can also download it as PDF and also I created a PowerPoint of it, but that's it for now.

Thanks for watching. And see you in the next one. Peace. (upbeat music)