World Retrospective Day is nearly upon us! In fact, less than 12 hours away. What is World Retrospective Day I might hear you asking? This worldwide day, held on 27th February, is a volunteer-based, globally-coordinated effort to celebrate and share in the power of retrospectives.
What is a retrospective?
Well these are cornerstone ceremonies in the Agile world. Meetings held at the end of a developmental iteration where the team reflect back on what happened, what went well and how to improve. The idea is for the team to reflect on the following questions:
- What worked well for us?
- What worked less well for us?
- What actions can we take to improve going forward?
Agile is built around continuous improvement, which makes the retrospective exceptionally important to Agile teams. One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is even “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.” The process requires trust in one another to be honest and fair, and to accept feedback in the pursuit of positive development. Team members must feel psychologically safe so that they can share their ideas and genuine opinions in order to make the changes they feel need to be made.
At AWA we firmly believe Agile values, processes and ceremonies need not be kept exclusive to software development teams. We use retrospectives in our organisation regularly to facilitate our own improvement. The Marketing team for which I am a part of, for instance, have a marketing retrospective every 2 weeks on a Friday where we reflect back over the last fortnight together.
So, what are we doing for World Retrospective Day?
Last year we ran a Meetup with #Play14; a community of people who are passionate about using games and experiential learning professionally to celebrate and share World Retrospective Day. This year we are doing a whole company retrospective, where our entire UK team will get together (something which doesn’t often happen due to our busy global training schedule) to discuss what’s worked well in 2019 and ways to improve so the rest of the year is the best it can be!
Promoting the Power of Retrospectives
In the spirit of promoting retrospectives and their power in improvement. We offer training which develops your ability to facilitate effective Agile meetings and ceremonies like the retrospective. Our Agile Team Facilitator course (ICP-ATF) will give you the tools and skillset to help the team-driven process of a retrospective so that teams can build trust and work through common pitfalls together.
“One of the most engaging and creative courses I have been on that flowed very naturally and made me feel well equipped to be a facilitator in any situation.”