The greatest waste … is failure to use the abilities of people … to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions they are eager to make.
W. Edwards Deming
Retrospectives play a key role in building a high-performing agile delivery system. However they often fail to deliver due to lack of clear goals, dysfunctional team dynamics, and no real follow-through on improvement actions. This article seeks to help make retrospectives work for your team and your organization.
Summary
- Without clear, measurable goals for improvement, many retrospectives deliver few real benefits. Successful teams have clear, measurable targets for their delivery performance, and everyone on the team is committed to achieving them.
- Successful change is only possible where teams engage in the open exchange of ideas and problem-solving. Team health is critical for making progress.
- Many problems identified in retrospectives lie beyond the control of the team and require leadership engagement and support.
- Failure to implement retrospective actions in a timely manner leads to recurrence of common problems and team disengagement.
Steps can be taken to address these common challenges and ensure teams are embarked on a journey of sustainable improvement.
Lack of clear goals for delivery performance.
Successful teams have clear, measurable targets for their delivery performance, and everyone on the team is committed to achieving them. Lack of goals means lack of direction, and no way to measure progress. What kind of goals should delivery teams have?
The primary focus of agile delivery teams must be on creation of value for their customers. Every process, decision, and change must be viewed through the lens of customer value. Value is created by systematically reducing waste and optimizing delivery processes to benefit the customer. In support of this, Agile teams will have goals for things like: achieving stable and predictable throughput, cycle time reduction, and high quality delivery leading ultimately to improved value for the customer. The Lean model of improvement is referred to as Kaizen: development of small, incremental improvements that build towards long term goals. Agile teams use the Retrospective process to assess their ongoing performance and identify improvements. A Kaizen approach can be adopted for retrospectives to help teams pursue long-term goals vs ad hoc changes.
Agile product development teams must establish a stable and predictable system of delivery. Once this is in place they must then focus on continuously improving their delivery processes in the service of creating more value for their customers. In the absence of goals, a team may be only focused on short-term ad hoc improvements, or things that have little impact on the team’s ability to create value.
Having specific goals for delivery system performance: Cycle Time, Throughput, Quality and Predictability provides direction, and brings clarity on priorities. These goals bring clearer focus to the retrospective process, and enable teams to prioritize those changes that contribute towards their goals. Teams must challenge anything, including their existing operating model and delivery processes. Anything that gets in the way of achieving their goals should be on the table for discussion. The goal is not to “optimize waste” but to eliminate it.
Teams might initially begin working on the key enablers of high performance delivery: forming cross-functional teams and building ready backlogs. These are the basic prerequisites for the ability to consistently produce working tested software as the output of every sprint.
And whereas many organizations may check progress on their goals annually or quarterly, this would be like steering a ship by checking the compass once a day. Constant minor corrections are needed to stay on course, and agile teams make these adjustments on a much more frequently based on their retrospective cadences.
Then assuming they do have goals for delivery performance, fundamental questions to be tackled in a respective should be:
- Where are we vs. our goals, and are we making progress?
- What’s helping us (achieve our goals)?
- What’s holding us back?
- What actions can we take to get closer to our goals?
Lack of full engagement from team members.
A fundamental requirement for improvement is that problems are surfaced and not swept under the rug. Psychological safety is essential within a team for members to feel they can openly discuss all problems. Some team members may find it hard to participate in the retrospective process, especially if problems around interpersonal dynamics need to be addressed. Some people by nature will be uncomfortable discussing these things, however this may also be a symptom of low levels of trust within the team – see. Patrick Lencioni The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – where he describes how lack of trust leads to a cascade of problems within teams that severely impact cohesion and performance. Teams built on trust are more likely to engage in unfiltered conflict around solving problems and new ideas. It all starts with trust:
Because they trust one another:
- They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
- They commit to decisions and plans of action.
- They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
- They focus on the achievement of collective results.
Progress is accelerated when the team is healthy. Team health surveys can help identify issues within the team that need attention. More on surveys here.
Trust is one issue, lack of empowerment is another. Without empowerment team members my shrug and ask ‘Why bother?’ People will not take action if they feel disempowered. Team health surveys can help uncover issues related to trust and empowerment.
Many needed improvements are outside of team control.
The Deming 94-6 rule applies: 94% of problems in an organization are caused by the system, while only 6% are within the team. Agile practices like Scrum or Kanban help expose the problems, but solutions are often beyond the team. Changes that require leadership support like organizational changes or additional funding for tools, training and process improvements rely on a strongly aligned and engaged leadership. There must be organizational mechanisms in place for teams to escalate needed support for change. Examples of these are the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) concept in SAFe, or John Kotter’s ‘Guiding Coalition’ from his Leading Change best seller.
Lack of follow-through on actions
Retrospectives and other continuous improvement processes should produce actions and ideas about what improvements to make. However there is often little or no follow through on these actions. Actions must be clear with ownership and acceptance criteria, and mechanisms for tracking these to completion. No action will be taken on actions that are not clear. The accumulation of incomplete action items leads to the recurrence of problems holding the team back and ultimately to disillusionment with the retrospective process.
Treat the retrospective as a Kaizen event – something that enables the team to make small, incremental improvements in their delivery performance. Little’s Law applies here too: too much action item WIP negatively affects Cycle Time on actions. Thus, keep actions small in scope, and emphasize finishing in-process actions before starting new ones. The one-piece-flow principle also applies: choose a single improvement item that the team can successfully complete in the next one or two sprints. A simple Kanban Board (a ‘Kaizen Kanban’) might help to manage improvement actions.
By reviewing previous action items and evaluating their effectiveness, teams can measure the progress of their continuous improvement efforts. This feedback loop is essential, as it allows teams to refine their strategies based on real outcomes. If a change did not yield the expected benefits, the team can revisit it in the next retrospective and decide on further adjustments or alternatives. In this way the retrospective acts as the Check step in a basic PDCA loop.
In Scrum, the PDCA cycle can be applied at various steps in the process, such as sprint reviews, during sprint retrospectives and daily scrums. For example, during a sprint retrospective, the team can use the PDCA cycle to evaluate their work, identify areas for improvement, and generate insights and actions.
Conclusion
There are a number of common challenges that prevent teams from realizing positive outcomes from retrospectives. Fortunately there are basic steps that can be taken to correct these and help teams get onto a solid path of sustainable improvement.
Tools – iRetro
iRetro: A flexible retrospective tool that allows teams to allows teams to collaborate visually in real-time
- Provide feedback anonymously, vote on issues and prioritize action items.
- Integrated Team Survey that teams can optionally take before, during or after the retrospective.
- Integrated Kanban Board that can be used to organize and track action items.
By combining these best practices and tools, remote and distributed teams can conduct retrospectives that are effective, engaging, and conducive to continuous improvement.