What’s your favourite question to ask in retrospectives?

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only helpful at the end of the project — too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.

Retrospectives are popular in the team-working world of the Lean & Agile community. The purpose of the sprint retrospective is to find areas for improvement. The meeting sets out to identify potential pitfalls and past mistakes while finding ways to avoid them in the future. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on what was successful and therefore should continue.

In my opinion, retrospectives are the most important meeting in Scrum. It gives a sense of the ScrumMaster’s depth of knowledge and Creativity. I’ve been disappointed to discover that most of the ScrumMasters I’ve interviewed only say that they ask the standard:

• What went well?
• What didn’t go well?
• What can we improve?

Here are some of the retrospective questions of mine:

• What’s one word would you use to describe this sprint?
• Who did you see doing something you think everyone should try?
• Whom have you observed not only doing his/her job but also helped the team as a whole?
• What was the most frustrating moment last sprint?
• If you want to describe the last sprint using a movie/TV show, what would you name it?
• If our team were a superhero, what were its superpowers this sprint?
• What’s our weakest link as a team?
• Did any of the improvements from our previous retro help you this sprint?
• How would you deal with [X issue] in hindsight?
• What’s the smallest thing you could do to make an improvement to [X issue]?
• What’s the cost of doing nothing about [X issue]?
• Name one essential thing for your work satisfaction? of course, apart from salary!
• What is the one thing you do not want to compromise even during the worst times at work?
• If you could change one thing about your team’s working style, what would it be?
• Did you learn something new last sprint?
• What went wrong that caught you off guard?Which problem came up most often?
• What helped you to make your best team contribution this sprint?
• What do you expect? from who?
• What keeps you awake at night?
• How can you help your teammates?
• What was unusual about this sprint?
• What would you do differently?
• What shall we do less/more?

Retrospectives are used frequently to give teams the opportunity to pause and reflect on how things have been going and then, based on those reflections, identify the improvements they want to make. Conducting Retrospectives frequently and regularly supports a team to continuously improve their performance — but what’s the best way to go about it?

Here are 10 retrospective ideas that you can add to your Scrum toolkit.

• Liked, learned, lacked, longed for (4 L’s)
• Sailboat
• Speedcar
• Starfish (small, large)
• Stop, start, continue
• Mad, sad, glad
• Token of appreciation
• One word retrospective
• KALM (Keep, add, more, less)
• and when you have no idea what to do…just use lean coffee style

Retrospectives are necessary for a successful agile process. Unfortunately, though, they can sometimes be dry and dull. One way to make retrospective questions more fun and engaging is to add an icebreaker section at the beginning of the meeting. Icebreakers can help everyone shift into a more open frame of mind when discussing what went well and what might be improved during the sprint.

By getting everyone involved in answering questions about their experience during the sprint, you can surface issues and ideas for improvement that may not otherwise have been discussed. Doing this can help to make the retrospective more productive and informative, as well as enjoyable overall.

Regardless of whether you follow an agile framework for project management or not, a retrospective meeting acts as a fantastic opportunity to pause and reflect. Your team will gain a comprehensive view of every increment, and quickly identify areas for continuous improvement. The quality of work delivered to the business will be stronger, productivity will increase, and so will the happiness of your team.

Need more retrospective ideas? Keep following my posts on Agile.

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