TL; DR: Unfinished Action Items: How to Make Retrospectives Useful
If your team consistently creates action items during Retrospectives but rarely completes them, you’re not alone. Unfinished action items are a major productivity killer and lead to stalled progress. This article highlights five actionable practices to ensure Retrospective tasks get done, including limiting action items in progress, assigning clear ownership, and adding a review of the progress in every Retrospective.
The key to real improvement isn’t in creating long lists—it’s in following through. By treating Retrospective action items with the same importance as other Sprint tasks, your team can finally break the cycle of unfinished improvements and see real, beneficial change, individually and at the team level.
The Meta-Retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action items. It comprises team members of one or several product teams—or a representative from those—and stakeholders. Participants from the stakeholder side are people from the business as well as customers. Meta-Retrospectives are useful both as a regular event, say once a quarter, or after achieving a particular milestone, for example, a specific release of the product.
TL; DR: Retrospective Facilitation — Going from Good to 🦄 Great
The magic technique to turn a boring Retrospective into an outstanding Retrospective is the rotation of the facilitator role equally among all team members. Check out the following ten benefits of this Retrospective facilitation practice, from boosting learning and skill development to ensuring continuity to encouraging ownership.
TL; DR: ChatGPT 4: A Bargain for Scrum Practitioners?
When OpenAI released its new LLM model GPT-4 last week, I could not resist and signed up for $20 monthly. I wanted to determine whether ChatGPT 4 is superior to its predecessor, which left a good impression in recent months; see my previous articles on Scrum, Agile, and ChatGPT.
I decided to run three comparisons, using the identical prompt to trigger answers from the new GPT-4 and previous GPT-3.5 models. Read on and learn what happened. It was not a foregone conclusion.
What is your take on the Retrospective: A routine exercise at the end of a Sprint, supported by standard operating procedures? Or a critical part of a Scrum team’s journey of continuous improvement? As you may assume, I advocate for the latter. In my experience, Scrum teams start utilizing Retrospectives to their full potential when they embrace a short set of Retrospective first principles, outlining the essence of the Why, the What, and the How.
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. What if, for example, not all of your Scrum team’s members feel enthusiastic about the Sprint Retrospective, the critical event when the Scrum team inspects itself? How can you help them become dedicated supporters instead? Join me and delve into how to avoid teammates feeling like prisoners of Retrospectives in less than two minutes.
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