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 vision/strategy, dysfunctional team cultures, and no real follow-through on improvement actions. This article seeks to help you make retrospectives work for your team and your organization.
Summary
- In the absence of a compelling vision and goals 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.
Lack of a clear vision and goals.
In Lean, 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 therefore have a both vision for the products they are developing and also goals for the performance of the process used to develop them. In the absence of a set of such goals, a team may be only focused on short-term ad hoc improvements. Or worse, may focus on things that are of no relevance to the team’s or organization’s success, delivering little or no real improvement. A Product Vision is a statement about what problem we are trying to solve for customers. The Product Vision acts as the overarching goal for the team. The Product Vision communicates the essential purpose of the product. It provides focus on what is really important, and provides direction for the team. At the same time the goal is broad enough to facilitate ongoing innovation. A clear and compelling vision is essential for the product they are developing or the service they are providing. Teams that are not designed around value delivery can benefit from a value stream mapping exercise can help ensure they are focused on have clear missions based on customer value delivery, and can operate with maximum independence and autonomy. The best delivery performance in terms of throughput and delivery cycle time is achieved with small, autonomous, cross-functional teams that can independently deliver deployable features.
Realization of the vision requires continuously improving levels of delivery performance. Although perfection is a goal that can never be attained, teams are expected to constantly raise the bar on performance. Having measurable goals for delivery performance (Cycle Time, Throughput, Quality) provides a North Star reference for a team to work towards. These goals can provide stronger focus for the retrospective process, and enable teams to make small continuous improvements that build towards a long term vision.
Thus assuming we actually do have product goals and goals for our delivery performance, the 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 can find it hard to participate in the retrospective process, especially if it involves topics involving interpersonal dynamics. While some people by nature will be uncomfortable discussing these things, this may 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 mostly 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 responsive 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
A retrospective should produce a set of ideas or actions about what improvements to make. However there is often be little or no follow through on these actions. Having a prioritized set of actions to be taken, clear ownership of these actions, and tracking these to completion is needed to make tangible 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 retrospectives, ensuring they are genuinely addressed 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.
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.