This document provides information about facilitating agile retrospectives. It discusses the purpose of retrospectives in helping teams reflect and improve their work. It emphasizes establishing capable facilitators and evaluating retrospectives. The document recommends limiting the number of improvement actions and following up on them. It also discusses getting business value from retrospectives and providing a toolbox of exercises that can be used, including exercises for new teams or teams becoming agile. It encourages facilitating retrospectives to drive team-led improvement.

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Ben Linders Advies
Spice up your Agile Retrospectives
with Valuable Exercises
Lean Kanban France, November 6, 2014
Ben Linders Advies

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Ben Linders Advies
On the agenda today …
• “What” and “why” of Retrospectives
• Facilitating Retrospectives
• Business Value and Benefits
• Workshop: Retrospective Exercises
With agile retrospectives teams drive their own actions!
Ben Linders

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Ben Linders Advies
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
Retrospectives Facilitator, Agile Coach/Mentor
CMMI & People-CMM Assessor
Freelance Editor on Enterprise Agile for InfoQ.com
Who is Ben Linders?
Co-Author Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
Dutch French Japanese Spanish Italian Chinese
Author: What Drives Quality
eBook: Download from InfoQ or Leanpub
Print: Buy on Amazon or Lulu

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Agile Retrospectives
Practice for teams to reflect on their way of working
and to continuously become better in what they do.
Focus upon
• Team
• Self organizing
• Collaboration
• Direct Value
What is an Agile Retrospectives

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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.”

Norm Kerth http://www.retrospectives.com/
Create an Open Culture
where team member Speak Up
with Respect for each other
to Learn and Improve
Soft Skills Matter

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Why Retrospectives?
To help teams to solve problems and improve themselves!
• Becoming Agile and Lean
• Make existing processes more Agile
• Increase Value of Agile
• Less resistance to Change

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Capable Retrospective Facilitators
Effective and Efficient Retrospectives:
• Vital few improvement actions
• Keep the invested time low
Facilitation by capable people:
• Qualify and Authorize facilitators
• Train: Purpose, techniques, skills Agile Improvement
• Mentoring & coaching
• Share & discuss retrospective experiences

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Do and Evaluate Retrospectives
• Prepare: Purposes and establishing capable facilitators
• Start with retrospectives in your first iteration
• Simple technique: asking questions or boat exercise
Evaluate the Retrospective, ask:
• Is this useful?
• Helps to get a shared understanding how things go?
• Do the actions make sense?
• Does meeting as a team to reflect feel good?

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Business Value
Agile retrospectives help teams learn and improve, and
increase their business value to their customers and
the company
Getting more Business Value:
• Expectations
• Limit Actions
• Follow up on Actions
Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives

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Expectations for Retrospectives
• Effective Teamwork
• Better Collaboration
• Development Process
• Velocity / Productivity
• Product Quality
• Costs
• Lead Time

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Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises
• Teams are different
• Needs vary in time
• Deliver more value for Teams
You can plan a retrospective meeting,
and think about the technique that
you want to use, but be open to
change it on the spot whenever
needed.
Toolbox of Retrospective Techniques

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Retrospective Exercises
• Asking questions
• One-word retrospective
• Root Cause Analysis
• Timeline
• Flow and Energy
• Asking Why?
• Strenghts (Solution Focused)
• Perfection game
• Action priorities
• Retrospective of Retrospectives
• Teams with multiple customers
Book with Agile Retrospective Exercises

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Today’s Exercises
• New Team
• Team Becoming Agile
• Team in Trouble
Roles:
• Facilitator
• Team members
• Observers

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Group Exercise
Timeline:
• 5 min: read exercise and divide roles
• 20 min: do the retrospective
• 5 min: evaluate exercise
Evaluate
• How did it go?
• What did you learn?

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Tirer profit des rétrospectives agiles
Une boîte à outils d'activités de
rétrospective
Avec une large panoplie
d'activités, Tirer profit des
rétrospectives agiles vous aidera
à devenir plus efficace dans
l'animation de rétrospectives et
d'en retirer davantage
Avant-propos d'Esther Derby et
Alexandre Boutin.

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Ben Linders Advies
Book Discounts
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
By Luis Gonçalves & Ben Linders
bit.ly/RetroValue
French: Tirer profit des rétrospectives agiles
40% Discount eBook:
bit.ly/RetroValueFR / bit.ly/RetroValueLKFR
Paperback: €10,-

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Ben Linders Advies
Questions?Questions?
Ben Linders
Independent Consultant 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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Environment for Retrospectives
Adopting retrospectives is an organizational change
where professionals adapt their way of working, their
behavior - It won’t just happen, and if not properly
supported it may take much time, or even fail.
• Why Retrospectives
• Capable Facilitators
• Do and Evaluate Retrospectives
Adopting Agile Retrospectives

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Purpose of Retrospectives
Help those involved to know why they should do
retrospectives
• Teams have authority and responsibility on how to do
their work
• The need for continuous improvement
• Celebrate and reward success
• Empasize “why over how”
Sustainable Improvement through Agile Retrospectives

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Leading Retrospectives
Roles
• Facilitator – Servant Leader
• Coach – Support Change
• Manager – Arrange for Change
All roles are needed
Play the game together
Action is in the interaction

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Limit the number of Actions
• Small Action
• Change Frequently
• Focus on Value
• Stop Starting, Start Stopping
• Kanban
Short Cycled Improvement

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Follow up on Actions
• Make them Visible
• Check status in the next Retrospective
• Mentor & Coach teams on Continuous Improvement
Making Quality & Process Improvement Visisble
Uncovering Better Ways to do Process Improvement
Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement

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Retrospective Benefits
• Actions done by the Team
• Power to the Team
• Changes that Stick

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Examples
The Sprint that failed
• Trust and Empowerment
• Deal with Feelings
The team that wasn’t a team yet
• Getting to know each other
• Skills & Open Culture

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Becoming Agile and Lean
Ask yourself:
• How Agile are you?
• Where do you want to become
more Agile, and why?
• What can you do next?
Journey to Become Agile and Lean

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Assessing yourself
• Readiness
• Agile / Scrum Practices
• Culture & Mindset
• Agile Fluency
• Roadmaps for Adoption
• Maturity
Agile Self-Assessment

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Agile Process Improvement
Expected benefits:
• Collaboration PI team and stakeholders
• Deploy (over define) processes
• Adopt to changes
• Incrementaly, ROI
• Learn to work Agile
Process Improvement: The Agile Way

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Golden Rules for PI
• Dare to share, Early & frequently
• The result depends on team – Not individuals
• The one who starts something is not
necessarily the one to finish it
• The one’s working on a task are the right
people
• You may critique anything, but never criticize
anyone
Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement

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Agile using the People CMM
Implementing Agile with the People-CMM

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Resistance to Agile?
• Talk with them
• Listen what they have to say
• Take them seriously
• Ask why and how
Resistance = Information!
Dealing with Resistance

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Articles on Effective Agile
• Self-assessing how Agile you are
• Sustainable Improvement through Agile Retrospectives
• Working in a Sustainable Pace
• Becoming Agile and Lean
• Succes Factors for Using Scrum and Getting Benefits
• Process Improvement: The Agile Way
• Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement
• How to deal with Resistance when Implementing Agile
• Managing Projects with Agile Teams
• Agile Project Management
• Establishing and Maintaining Stable Teams
• Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives
• Sharing Knowledge is Power
• Are your Professionals Empowered?