Do you want to pimp your retrospectives in 2017? Here are some quick and simple ideas to improve your them.

1 – Bring food

It is always a great idea to bring food to your retrospectives. It can be such simple things like some salt sticks or cookies. You will see: This simple trick will set a great tone for the rest of the retrospective. You can read more about it here.

2 – Set a goal for the two month

Most retrospectives start on a clean greenfield without taking the results from the last retrospectives into account. Instead, set a goal for the next two or three month, e.g. improve code quality and focus on this goal in the upcoming retrospectives. This way, your retrospectives have a clear purpose, and you only discuss topic related issues. Additionally, you can build on the outcomes from the last retrospectives instead of starting from a clean greenfield. You can read more about if here.

3 – Experiment

We all work in a complex adaptive system, which means, that it is unpredictable. You’ll never know if the tasks you defined in your last retrospective will have the expected outcome. That’s why I prefer to talk about experiments instead of tasks. When you start an experiment, you want to proof that your hypothesis (our expected outcome) is true. If not, you just try another experiment, until the issue is solved. Additionally, it invites the team to be bold and try something new.

4 – Discuss your improvements in the planning

One of the biggest problems with retrospectives is that the defined experiments are not executed because the team forgot about them or just didn’t have the time. To avoid this problem, put your experiment into the backlog for the next planning and handle it like any other backlog item, including the task breakdown in planning two. Now your experiment is part of the sprint backlog and can be easily tracked and won’t be forgotten.

5 – Focus on ONE thing

Another mistake that is made quite often is that the team wants to execute more experiments than they are able to. Instead, focus on exactly one experiment. This helps you to ensure, that there is enough capacity to execute the experiment. Nothing is more annoying than a list of experiments that nobody worked on. Pro tip: Don’t throw away your other brilliant experiment ideas, but put them in an experiment backlog. If there is some capacity left, you might start one of these, too. Furthermore, you can shorten your next retrospective by just selecting the next experiment with the highest probability of success from that backlog.

I hope you like these little improvements. I’d like to hear from you if you tried them out. Happy retrospecting 😉