Retrospective with multiple teams or with a large audience

Agile India 2014

Retrospective with multiple teams or with a large
group
Abhilash Chandran
Xerox …….
Twitter: cabhilash

Agenda
Review the most popular format of conducting retrospective with multiple teams from different
backgrounds.
This format can be easily adopted and scaled for a very large audience

Agile Retrospective
 Retrospectives are one of the most integral components of any agile methodology. This helps the
team in continuous improvement.
 Retrospective with a single team or small group is simple. It is a different ball game altogether when
this has to be scaled up to a large audience or multiple teams.

The big Picture
 Multiple Scrum teams working on same product
 Core Feature teams
 UI team

 Other important stakeholders like Sales team and management

 Different Views and perception with -Business development team and higher management

The Problem
In a complex environment with multiple team and people working together
• Each team will have their own retrospective.
• They may also have Scrum of Scrum.

But even then there will be problems like
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Cross team Communication
Adaptation & understanding of technical practices
Workflow Feature breakdown across multiple teams
Combined demo of feature to clients
Late night work because of lack of proper co-ordination between different stakeholders

See something similar ? We faced almost all of these

Proposed Solution
After the first phase of delivery it was decided to have a program level retrospective to find out the
issues which we couldn’t solve at each team level.

The fun begins…
Next slide talks about the format used for many such large retrospectives.

Meeting Preparation
 Set the goals
 Issues to be discussed

 Advertise
◦ Posters were put in team work area, cafeteria, notice boards etc.
◦ Email invitations were send to block the calendar

 Duration
 Two days for a 6 month big bang meeting

 Gather Data
 Review the old data – bugs, emails, storied delivered which can help in discussions

 Working Agreements
 Finalize set of working arrangements which is agreeable to all the teams.

 Invitations
 Create an itinerary and inform everyone

 Venue

Opening Day
 Self Introduction
 It will be a big crowd with many new faces. To make all comfortable setup some time for self-introduction.

 Review Agenda
 Reiterate the objectives and itinerary

 Working Agreements
 Gently remind everyone about the working agreements

 Reiterated the project vision
 Invite the key stakeholders to explain the vision of the project and their perception about success

 Emotions – perception about projects success
 Invite people from general audience to explain their view about the success of the project. A general voting with raised hands was
used to identify people’s perception of success of the project

Data Gathering
 Timeline
◦ Stick Chart Papers across the walls
◦ During this stage, ask the participants to create a timeline of events on post it notes and stick it on the walls.

◦ They can use all the data which they have gathered.

 Story Telling
 With the help of the participants ask volunteers to explain the whole timeline to the entire gathering.
 This will help all the attendees to understand the activities of each stage.
 After this everyone will have a better perception/understanding of the tasks done by each group

Generate Insights
 Discussion Points
 Identify topics for discussion
 Asked the participants to refer the time line and think of important events.

◦ Good things which should be kept
◦ Areas which needs to be improved
◦ Any topic which needs group attention or worth discussing

 Sorting/Theming
 Common topics were stacked together and they were arranged under different themes.

 Sub Groups working on different themes
◦ Divided the gathering into multiple groups/teams and assign different themes to them.

 Brainstorming
◦ Groups brainstormed among themselves to identify the discussion point and story behind the topics in their theme.
◦ After the group discussion volunteers from each group explained the points of their theme to entire group.

Action Points
 Prioritize
o Colour coded Dot Voting – identified good areas and areas of improvement in each theme

 Formalize top Action items
o Took top 3 items for further discussion
o 5 Whys and Fish bone analysis ( choose any other method people are familiar with)

 Plan to track Action items
 Assign volunteers who can track and work with key people to get the action items completed
 Put the action items and results in some common shared location like SharePoint

Closing ceremony
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Summarize the event
Read out the key learnings from the event
Ask for any quick suggestion to improve the gathering next time.
Provided contact detail of the key people whom people can contact with suggestions and concerns
Appreciate everyone’s effort and participation

Key Learnings
Helped us to
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Apply the improvements made at each team level to the whole program
Find inefficiencies which were not visible at individual team level
Brainstorm and find solution to some common issues across teams.
Provides a platform for teams from different backgrounds/departments to interact.
Provide a common focus and improvement plan across teams.
Learn from the success/failure of the program which could be applied to other programs.
Continuously improve as a big group.

Retrospective with multiple teams or with a large audience

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