The mini-workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives at eXperience Agile 2020 provides you with ideas to debug your agile retrospectives, find out why they aren’t working and learn how to spice them up and bring the energy back in the team. Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions coming up every retro? People skip the retro, or find them boring? A lack of energy in the room? Chit-chatting instead of discussing real issues? No need for that, let’s retrospect your retrospectives! In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect on how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again. It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 20 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn. Agile retrospectives should help teams to reflect at the end of each iteration to learn and decide what to improve and take action in the next iteration. Valuable Agile Retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in the organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value. But sometimes retrospectives don’t live up their expectation. Problems that can happen are: The same questions (what went well, what to improve) are being asked Similar actions keep coming up in every retrospective Nothing happens after the meeting, actions are not done People are postponing or skipping the retrospective meeting Team members complain that retrospectives are boring and a waste of time There’s a lack of energy in the room during the meeting, people are not engaged People don’t feel safe to speak up and share their view Discussions in the retrospective are not about the real problems (elephant in the room) The retrospective facilitator is leading people towards a pre-defined answer/solution In this session, teams will be doing 5 different exercises. In a time slot of two hours, teams rotate to do 2-3 of them. Intended audience: Scrum masters, agile coaches, tech leads, developers, testers, operations, and anyone who facilitates retrospectives. This session includes ideas published in my book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, practices from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox, and agile coaching tools available in my webshop. It’s partly based on things that I teach in one of my workshops: Increasing Organizational Agility with Retrospectives. Learning Objectives: Learn to use exercises to reflect on your current practice of retrospectives See how to create a safe and productive environment to run retrospectives Practice effective skills for facilitating retrospectives and getting people engaged

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Ben Linders Consulting
Mini-workshop
Retrospecting your Retrospectives
Experience Agile 2020
September 28-30
Ben Linders

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Retrospectives are always great
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Except when they are not
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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospective problems
Same
actions
come up
Nothing
happens
Retro
skipped
Boring
meetings
Lack of
energy
No safety
Elephantin the
room
Pre-defined
outcome

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Ben Linders Consulting
Debugging Retrospectives
• Agile Retrospective bingo
• Retrospective on retrospectives
• Retrospective smells and antidotes
• Improve retrospective facilitation
• Assess strengths and weaknesses

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Ben Linders Consulting
Agile Retrospective Bingo

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospective on Retrospectives
Possible Exercises:
• Car Brand
• Triple S (Stop, Start, Spice up)
• Perfection Game
• One Word
• Core Qualities
• Faces Jack Sparrow
• …

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospective smells and antidotes

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Ben Linders Consulting
Improve retrospective facilitation
• Prime Directive
• Independent facilitator
• Deal with negative issues
• Encourage participation
• Give space to people
• Focus on the process
• Listen actively

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Ben Linders Consulting
Assess strengths and weaknesses

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Ben Linders Consulting
Remote/Distributed Teams
Invest time in getting people to know each other
More focus on preparation & facilitation
Arrange video (Skype, hangout, etc)
Tools:
• Lino – Sticky notes Remote Retros
• Miro – The online collaborative whiteboard platform
• Retrium – run effective retrospectives with Retrium
• Weave – Collaboration platform with serious games
• TeamRetro – Agile retrospectives made easy, effective, and
engaging

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Ben Linders Consulting
Effective Retrospectives
 Why over how
 Good facilitation
 Effective exercises
 Frequent, small steps
 Vital few actions

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Ben Linders Consulting
Questions?Questions?
Ben Linders
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.cominfo@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvieswww.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

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Background Information

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Ben Linders Consulting
Valuable Agile Retrospectives
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
By Luis Gonçalves & Ben Linders
Download from InfoQ or Leanpub
Buy on Amazon or other webshops
amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI
leanpub.com/gettingvalueoutofagileretrospectives
Mailinglist: eepurl.com/Mem7H

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Ben Linders Consulting
Inspiration for Retrospectives
Retrospective Exercises:
• amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI
• benlinders.com/exercises/
• benlinders.com/ask-your-agile-retrospective-qu

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospectives Book Bundle
Six successful retrospectives books
• Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
• Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Retrospectives
• The Retrospective Handbook
• Retrospectives for Organizational Change
• The Retrospectives Kickstarter
• Agile Retrospectives
leanpub.com/b/agileretrospectives
Make your agile retrospectives rock!
Teams will love to do them :-).

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Ben Linders Consulting
Assessing your Agility
Over 70 tools:
• Self-Assessment checklists
• Readyness checks
• Maturity assessments
• Agile health checks
• Measurements
• And much more!
Agile Self-Assessments

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Ben Linders Consulting
Services for Agile Self-assessments
Services for assessing your agility and increase delivered value:
• In-house workshop for playing the Agile Self-assessment Game
• Public workshops to experience the Agile Self-assessment Game
• Agile assessment for your team, department, or organization
• Facilitation for playing the game at your event (conference, meetup,
hackathon, game lab, etc)
• Tailoring the Agile Self-assessment Game to your specific needs
• Licenses for playing the game
• …
Contact: benlinders@gmail.com +31 6 2901 3863

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Ben Linders Consulting
Continuous Improvement
 Become aware of importance of continuous
improvement,
 Explore how it’s engrained in agile software
development
 Suggestions that you can use in your daily work
to improve continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
Leanpub.com/continuousimprovement
“Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing
whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable”

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Ben Linders Consulting
What Drives Quality
Deep Dive into Software Quality with Practical
Solutions for Delivering High Quality Products
for software developers and testers, architects,
Product Owners, agile coaches, Scrum masters,
project managers, and operational and senior
managers who consider quality to be important
Released: September 30, 2017
Second edition: Early 2019
Available on Amazon, leanpub, BenLinders