Erin’s retrospectives.

What is a retrospective?

Put simply, it is a regularly scheduled opportunity for reflection.

Ideally, a retrospective is a reflection on the process of how the team works together — not to be confused with a sprint review, which is a different reflection and opportunity to get feedback on the work being produced/delivered. For a scrum team, retrospectives usually occur every other sprint, whereas a sprint review usually occurs at the end of every sprint.

For more specifics on how to run retrospectives, check out this article from Atlassian (the company that owns Jira, Confluence, and Trello) on retro basics.

Why do we do retrospectives?

DO:

✅ Always remind the team/people involved of this mighty why before launching into it. .. even better when you can point back to action items that have actually been acted upon from the last retrospective; how we can harness the power of reflection to propel the team forward in real, visible ways.

✅ Keep a spot for this - whether it be connected to your usual board like Jira or Trello. You might also maintain and track the outcomes in a knowledge sharing space/base, like Confluence, Shared Drive Document or Sheet, or Github. Wherever you place it, make sure to keep it alive through a sprint goal or daily objective, written on a classroom wall, Canvas homepage, or clearly stated at the top of a sprint in Jira.

AVOID:

🕸 Nobody wants to pull the cobwebs off a retrospective item to start a fresh one. Few things are more defeating than feedback that wasn’t genuinely received. In fact, it implicitly asserts that team member feedback doesn’t matter — oof!

🕸 It doesn’t have to be a massive production! Kind of like educators that spend too much time decorating their classrooms when their outdated instruction blows. It doesn’t matter how cool your bulletin board or classroom door looks if students are learning at a high level (higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and collaboration)! Same goes here; the conversation that happens during the retrospective and the specific action items gained towards improvement matter most!