Skipping Retrospectives? — Making Your Scrum Work #17

TL; DR: Skipping Retrospectives?

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. One area where Scrum’s nature of being intentionally incomplete causes issues regularly is whether Scrum teams shall stick to the event schedule even if the team’s life is uneventful? For example, is skipping Retrospectives okay?

Join me and delve into the consequences of skipping Retrospectives in less than 90 seconds.

Skipping Retrospectives — Making Your Scrum Work #17 – Age-of-Product.com
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Data-Informed Retrospectives

TL; DR: Data-Informed Retrospectives

In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.

As I have observed in practice, many Scrum Teams either limit the data gathering part of the Retrospective, thus lacking vital information. Or they invest too much time doing so, leaving little capacity to analyze the data and come to conclusions on how to best improve as a team.

Read on and learn how you can avoid falling victim to both scenarios by gathering data continuously and asynchronously.

Data-Informed Retrospectives — Age-of-Product.oom
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Remote Agile (Part 5): Retrospectives with Distributed Teams

TL; DR: A Remote Retrospective with a Distributed Team

We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools, followed by exploring virtual Liberating Structures, how to master Zoom as well as common remote agile anti-patterns. This fifth article now dives into organizing a remote Retrospective with a distributed team: practices, tools, and lessons learned.

Remote Retrospective with a Distributed Team — Remote Agile (Part 5) — Age-of-Product.com
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Liberating Structures for Scrum (1): The Sprint Retrospective

TL; DR: Liberating Structures for Scrum: The Sprint Retrospective

Liberating Structures Sprint Retrospective: A few weeks ago, I started an event series with my Berlin-based Hands-on Agile Meetup group on how to improve Scrum events utilizing Liberating Structures — a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. The results have been fantastic so far, and I like to share these outcomes with those who cannot participate in person.

In this first post, learn more on how you can use Liberating Structures strings to improve the level of collaboration and engagement at Sprint Retrospectives.

Liberating Structures for Scrum (1): The Sprint Retrospective — Age-of-Product.com
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Solving Impediments as a Team

TL;DR: Solving Impediments as a Team

The main message of the retrospective was clear: there are too many interruptions by stakeholders and senior management. The interruptions impeded the flow of work through the team. Consequently, achieving the sprint goal had been at risk several times in the past. Moreover, the team missed the sprint goal twice recently. Solving impediments as a team has become a necessity.

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments and iterating on the solution.

Solving Impediments as a Scrum Team Interruption Buckets v2 — Age of Product Retrospectives
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