Nowadays, many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systematic organizational problems. Problems that exist at a project or product level are related to the collaboration between teams and their stakeholders. Agile retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, Ben Linders will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Organizational Agility: Taking
Retrospectives to the Next Level
DevOpsCon Munich, Dec 2-5, 2019
Ben Linders

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Ben Linders Consulting
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous improvement
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
BenLinders.com
Books: Valuable Agile Retrospectives Problem? What Problem?
What Drives Quality Self-assessments Continuous Improvement
Games: Agile Self-assessment Game Retrospectives Bingo Impediments
Quality Coaching Cards Agile Testing Cards

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Ben Linders Consulting
Improving Organizational Agility
 Systemic Complex Problems
 Projects / Products / Systems
 Cultural & Organizational Barriers
Agile Retrospectives to the next level

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Ben Linders Consulting
Involve Stakeholder: Challenges
 Busy – will they join the retro?
 Might not see the need/benefits
 Communication challenges
Prerequisites:
 Trust & safety
 Good relationship

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospectives with Stakeholders
 Invite all involved
 Problems relevant for all
 Suitable exercise/format
 Shared understanding
 Ownership of actions
Meeting Atmosphere
 Everyone feels welcome
 Safe to speak up
 No blaming & complaining
 Guiding toward results

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Ben Linders Consulting
Large-scale retrospectives
Project Product Organization
Release Delivery Quarterly
Collaboration Arch, Tech Debt Structure/culture
Dev, Ops, & Teams & Departments &
Stakeholders Arch / POs & PMs Managers
Timeline Value Stream Map Open Space
Large Sailboat Mad Sad Glad Self-assessment

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Ben Linders Consulting
Prime Directive
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly
believe that everyone did the best job they could, given
what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the
resources available, and the situation at hand.”
Project Retrospectives – A handbook for Team Reviews
Create an Open Culture
where people Speak Up
with Respect for each other
to Learn and Improve

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Ben Linders Consulting
Independent Facilitator
 Process
 Effectiveness
 Atmosphere
 No personal agenda
 Not involved in topic

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Ben Linders Consulting
Agility
shouldn’t be
your goal
It’s a means
to an end

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Ben Linders Consulting
Organizational-wide Collaboration

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Ben Linders Consulting
Contribute to goals
 What hinders us to reach our goal?
 What helps us to get there?
 How can we contribute to the goal?
 What are the risks & opportunities?
 What to pack for our agile journey?
Backpacking Retrospective

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Ben Linders Consulting
Imposing doesn’t work

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Ben Linders Consulting
Engage and empower
Retrospectives Exercises Toolbox

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Ben Linders Consulting
Enable organization for retrospectives
 Establish a culture of learning
 Drive out fear and blaming
 Do retrospectives at all levels

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Ben Linders Consulting
Key Takeaways
• Use retrospectives to address systemic issues and do
organizational-wide improvement
• Think about the exercises used in your retrospectives
and have a strong independent retrospective facilitator
• Don't impose change on people, engage and empower
people with self-assessments and gamification

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

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Ben Linders Consulting
Vital Few Actions
 Small Actions
 Frequent Change
 Focus on Value
 Stop Starting,
Start Finishing
Vital Few Actions