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 continuous improvement. However they often fail to deliver due to lack of clear vision or product 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 a relentless focus on the creation of customer value, many retrospectives deliver little meaningful improvement. Team members engage in superficialities without confronting real issues.
- Dysfunctional team cultures inhibit the open exchange of ideas and problem-solving.
- Many problems identified in retrospectives lie beyond the control of the team and require leadership engagement and support.
Steps can be taken to address these common challenges and ensure teams are embarked on a journey of sustainable improvement.
Optimizing Waste: Lack of focus on value creation.
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. Lean-Agile principles emphasize the understanding of customer needs and ensuring that all activities directly contribute to fulfilling these needs. Value is created by systematically reducing waste and optimizing processes to benefit the customer.
The pursuit of perfection means not only defect-free, but meeting exactly what customers need at a fair price and created with minimum waste. Product development teams must have a clear vision for the products they are developing and also a focus on continuously improving the processes used to develop them. In the absence of such 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.
A Product Vision is a statement about what problem we are trying to solve for customers and acts as the overarching goal for the team. The Product Vision provides focus on what is really important, and provides direction. At the same time it is broad enough to facilitate ongoing innovation. Teams need a clear and compelling vision for the product they are developing or the service they are providing.
When teams identify improvements via retrospective events or surveys it is not unreasonable to ask: how do these changes create more value? Without answers to this question it is impossible to say which improvements should be prioritized over others, and can result in making existing processes more efficient without fundamentally questioning or overhauling them. This approach can lead to “optimizing waste” rather than eliminating it, resulting in improvements that are often less impactful or sustainable. Having specific goals for delivery system performance brings focus for which improvements are needed. Measurable goals for Cycle Time, Throughput, and Quality provide a North Star reference for a team to work towards. These goals can bring clearer focus to the retrospective process, and enable teams to make small continuous improvements that build towards a long term vision.
When teams have a vision or “future state” that represents an optimized process with reduced waste and increased value delivery flow, this future state becomes a goalpost for continuous improvement efforts.
Thus assuming we actually do have goals for product and delivery performance, fundamental questions to be tackled in a respective should be:
- What’s helping us (achieve our goals), and
- What’s holding us back
Lack of full participation 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.
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 shine a light on 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, committed and enhahed 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 be little or no follow through on these actions. Having a prioritized set of actions with clear ownership, and mechanisms for tracking these to completion is needed to make sustainable progress. Actions from retrospectives must be incorporated into the team’s ongoing work. This also helps minimize having to deal with persistent and recurring problems that keep resurfacing in, ensuring they are driven to resolution and not just discussed. Short-term improvements can be added to the backlog for the next sprint, but longer term initiatives may need their own backlog and a board to track their progress.
Regular retrospectives enable teams to track the impact of changes over time. By reviewing previous action items and evaluating their effectiveness, teams can measure the progress of their continuous improvement efforts. This feedback loop is essential for continuous improvement, 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.
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 feedback and 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.