4/26/2023 0 Comments Knbn news center 1This is where an effective Scrum Master with strong facilitation skills is important and has an opportunity to shine. Lack of engagement – People check out, often due to the lack of action and improvements from earlier Sprint Retrospectives.What is the point of talking about problems if we never work to address them? Lack of action – The plan does not get actioned.Failure to create an actionable plan – The team gets stuck in the blame game and fails to create a plan of how to improve.The blame game – People start blaming each other for the problems.Too many problems – We may identify too many problems and feel overwhelmed.Here are some of the more common issues that are felt in Sprint Retrospectives: We can take advantage of new tools and practices to save time, money and energy.ĭespite the benefits of Sprint Retrospectives being clear, it can be surprisingly difficult to make them effective events. Small regular improvements add up and compound. Scrum Teams that are empowered to do this, and learn to do it effectively, typically see significant benefits. Rather than forcing people to carry on regardless of how bad the process around them may be, we are now empowering them and requiring them to improve things as they proceed. This is the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective. If we are missing a vital skill in the team, let’s figure out how we are going to get it. If testing is taking too long, let’s work out how to automate it. If a tool, is no longer fit for purpose, let’s replace it. Some time would be allocated at least monthly for the whole team to reflect on and plan future improvements to how they work. Scrum wraps the underlying agile principle in the Sprint Retrospective, the purpose of which is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness for a Scrum Team. Ken’s recognition of this led to it becoming a rule in Scrum. You may get away with it in the short term, but in the long run, it is a surefire route to oblivion. “If you’re not striving to improve, you’ll end up going backwards.” – (paraphrasing) Ken Schwaber He talked at some length about how organisations that failed to regularly improve their processes would appear to be moving backwards relative to the competition. When I first met Ken Schwaber (the co-creator of Scrum and founder of ) I can remember him talking about the importance of the Sprint Retrospective. It was only when I first encountered Scrum that for the first time that it seemed to me like the importance of this activity had finally been recognised. More often than not, the recommendations were filed away never to be seen again. It was also too little and too late to help with the project that we had just finished. The output was biased to my observations and resulted in little real change. Everyone else was busy doing other more important work. The problem still was that I was the only person active in this. The purpose was to reflect on the project and figure out how to improve moving forward. When a project came to an end, I was often tasked with creating a lessons-learned report. When I became a Project Manager, things changed but didn’t really improve. It felt wrong at the time and only encouraged bad practices like estimate inflation and hiding certain types of work. As a developer, if you wanted to do it you had to work covertly and build time into your estimates to improve things. Process improvement was always less important than short-term project delivery and so it rarely received any real attention. ![]() The promised “downtime” disappeared as we shifted focus to the new and already late project. Projects always overran and so the next project was late in starting. Where time was set aside for this it was always at the end of the project once we were done and we had some “downtime”. There was rarely time to pause, reflect and plan improvements to processes and ways of working. The focus was always on the project work we were doing and meeting a deadline. But it was a surprisingly rare practice in most organisations I encountered before Scrum & Agile became more widespread. Pausing regularly to do this seems like common sense. This time we are focussing on the following Agile principle – “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjust its behavior accordingly.” This post continues my ongoing series revisiting the principles behind the Agile Manifesto.
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