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Scrum retrospective

Building Actions

Now that you’ve analyzed the issue at hand, it’s (finally) time to make it actionable. The focus here is making sure you pick the best action for the upcoming iteration. Here we generate action items.

Activity:

Start Stop Continue

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Many teams start their retrospective with Start Stop Continue. That’s jumping into Solution Finding way too fast. Use this technique to help brainstorm a list of potential actions the team can take after it has identified an issue it wants to work on during Generating Insights.

Impact, Effort, and Energy

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Here’s how it works:
Put up a poster board with four columns: Idea, Effort, Impact, Energy
List out all ideas for action in the Idea column
Ask the team to estimate* the effort of each potential action, and put the results in the Effort column for reach item
Ask the team to estimate* the impact of each potential action, and put the results in the Impact column for reach item
Ask each person on the team to vote on the item or items that they personally feel most energized by, and put those votes in the Energy column
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Now that you have mapped out the Impact, Effort, and Energy of each potential action, the team can discuss which action makes the most sense. For example, an action that has low effort, high impact, and high energy, would be a great candidate to commit to. An action that has high effort, low impact, and low energy, is likely one you should skip.

Hypotheses and Experiments

Using hypotheses and experiments helps your group move from consensus decision making to consent decision making. When actions are presented as solutions, teams tend to want to build consensus to make sure they all agree that it is the right solution. When actions are presented as hypotheses, teams are less inclined to resist trying new things out (even if they don’t agree it’s the optimal experiment to run).

More ideas are can be found on the page
Retromat “what to do”
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