Ben Linders
Transcript
Okay, so I guess we're all ready to go. Welcome everybody to a workshop that they're gonna be doing here at Lean Camban France. Nice to see so many people in here attending this workshop. I'm gonna be focusing on spicing up your HR retrospective with exercises because I think that's the main ingredient that you can use to spice up your HR retrospectives in there. So this is going to be a two-part session today. First I'm going to be telling you some things about Retrospective. I'm going to be focusing on the role of facilitators in Retrospective. Why is it so important to have people who are really facilitating the meeting, focusing on getting value out of the Agile Retrospective. And we'll be looking also at the benefits that you can get out of Retrospective. So what makes it important? What's the kind of benefits that you can get out of it as a team? And what is the business value you can get out of it from an organizational perspective in there?
So a little background about me, I'm not going to be telling everything. Basically on this conference I'm here to present about Agile Retrospective. I'm also covering the conference for InfoQ with live news. Actually there's going to be a live publication during my talk, thanks to technology. So something's going to go live while I'm talking here. I wrote the book Getting Value Out of Agile Retrospectives. I did this to together with Luis Gonsalves. He's a Portuguese guy, he's living in Munich. He was blogging about retrospectives, sharing his experiences with exercises. I was doing the same and we found out that we had a shared interest in there, but also a shared drive, passion to help people and to help teams around the world to do better retrospectives. So that's why we decided to team up and start writing a mini book which has been published on InfoQ. It's also available on LeanPub. It came out last year and as a next step we got people interested to start translating the book to other languages. And actually now it is available already in six other languages. The Chinese edition is just out, it's the third. Sample of the book. It's going to be a full Chinese version later this year. It's also been translated to French with the help of volunteers here in France and in Belgium who helped translating the book. So they put in time and effort to translate the book to French. We worked together with them to share our knowledge and to share our experience with each other. That's what made it interesting for them.
So what are agile retrospectives? Basically, they are a practice that team are doing to learn, to reflect continuously on their way of working, and as a result from that, adapt their way of working. So finding better ways to do things, finding better ways to do their work. And that might be dealing with problems that the teams are experiencing. But the might also be that they are looking at ways to improve, to do even better the things that they are doing quite good already, and to get more results out of their way of working in there. Now what is it that makes HR retrospectives differently from other kind of postmortems or retrospectives or assessments? I think the main difference, I mentioned it already, is in the team doing it. So it's a team that is owning the retrospective. They will be doing the retrospective meeting. They will decide upon what they will be doing, what kind of actions that they want to take out of it. And they will also be doing those actions. So the focus is really upon the team and upon the team working, not that much about the organization. The organization will benefit as a whole. Basically the organization is the people working there. So if the people are improving, if the teams are improving, the organization will benefit from this. But the focus of the retrospective is much more on the team than it is on the organizational perspective.
The retrospect was focusing on self-organizing. So it's a team deciding what to do in there and to take action. And self-organizing, in my view, comes with a responsibility. If you want people to self-organize, people say, okay, I'm going to take control of the way that I'm doing my work in the organization. It also comes with a responsibility to do it in the best possible way. And I basically believe that people want to work in the best possible way. They want to do good things, they want to work together, they want to come to work and enjoy the things that they are doing there. But it helps to reflect frequently and to see how things are going and to see if they can do it even better or to find a way to deal with a problem that they are having in the team. So that's why retrospectives. Come in. Most of the retrospectives are about collaboration. It's the collaboration in the team, the team members working together. It's the team members working together with the product owner, with the other stakeholders in the organization. Because basically you can only get results when people start collaborating as a team, but also start collaborating and delivering value to the stakeholders in the organization. So I think collaboration is a central theme and what I see in many retrospectives I do, actions that are coming out of the retrospectives have to do with collaboration. And I think the last benefit from retrospectives to mention is the direct value because you're doing them frequently You're doing them once every week, every two weeks, every iteration. And you're getting direct feedback from what you are seeing in your team. You're able to do actions in the next iteration already. So it's much quicker feedback, much quicker improvement in your organization that you would have with traditional methods. If you look at the project post-mortem, it will be evaluated at the end. Some would write a big report saying what they have learned. in the project and what the organization could do differently, that would have to go into your organization and then you would hope for some project to pick up some of the stuff in there and to actually understand what is written down there, like you've written a requirement specification, do you really understand what is meant in there and to take action. We just pictures are completely different as it is a team who's taking action in there.
I think to do retrospectives effectively, you need a good culture. You need the right culture where people are open to change.
And what's important in there is that people respect each other, respect each other, respect each other's opinions in there and look for collaborative ways to change the way of working in the organization. The focus of the retrospective is to learn and improve and that's the culture that you would like to have in the retrospective meeting. This is a prime directive from Norm Kurt. Norm Kurt wrote the book on project retrospectives, where we actually focused on how projects can do retrospectives and get better benefits out of that. And what he saw was that many organizations didn't have the right culture and they saw their retrospectives turning into blame meetings. And you don't want that. So he said it's important to have the right culture. I know many facilitators actually use this prime directive and would read it out loud at the start of the meeting. I don't do that, but it can be helpful to remind. people of this. Yes?
Even though you have respect, it doesn't mean that you cannot disagree with somebody else, right?
Yeah, you can agree to disagree. But at least you have to respect somebody's opinion.
And to listen to each other and to, I think the most important in there is to understand, to understand why somebody is thinking, why somebody sees something as a problem and to understand each other. If you can understand each other, then you can usually find a solution in there. You can even decide to disagree at this moment in time, but at least try to understand each other. That's important. Great question.
So, already mentioned, why would you do retrospective? The basic idea is behind supporting teams in their learning. So that's the idea behind the retrospective. What's the bigger benefit in there? And I think retrospectives can help teams to become more agile and lean. So it can help them to travel their own agile journey. I don't think there's a fixed format for agile for a team. And teams will have to travel their own journey, find their own way to implement agile, find their own way to be doing things in there. And retrospectives are a help for the team to find that way, to reflect, to decide how they are doing right now, to adopt new practices, to change the way that they're doing things. I think that's what makes it important for teams to use retrospectives as a practice in their team.
It can also help to make existing practices more agile. When you're looking at larger organizations who have a lot of practices in place, who have processes that have been defined in the organization, then the retrospective can help to look at that and to say, hey, what's working out well and where do we need some improvement? Where are processes that are hindering us, that are not really helping us to deliver value to our customers? So let's take a look at them and let's use the retrospective to change those processes and do it in a different way.
One of the big benefits also from retrospectives is since it's the team that is reflecting, learning and deciding what to do, there's usually much less resistance to change. Because if a team agrees that something needs to be changed, they're not going to be resisting to that. But if changes are being imposed upon teams, are being imposed upon people, then there's a big chance that people might resist to that. You know the terminology, people have no problem with change, but they don't like to be pressed for change. Change shouldn't be imposed on people. They should have the freedom to decide what they want to change. And retrospectives actually help them to use this freedom and to find their best way of changing.
So where would you do retrospectives? If you look at an agile process, scrum process for assistance, then retrospectives are usually done at the end of the iteration, at the end of the sprint. So you would do them just after a demo and just before the planning game of the next sprint.
Because that's the sweet spot to do any changes in your team, in your way of working. You just learned how the sprint has gone. You've delivered your software, you've got feedback from the product owners, all the stakeholders have seen your product. And this is a great point in time to see how are we doing and what should we do differently. In the next sprint. We actually had an open space yesterday where we discussed how you would do this in the Kanban way. And what we saw was there are teams who do this on a weekly base. So they say, okay, we just do a weekly retrospective, usually every Friday to reflect what happened that week and to take some learning out of that. There are teams who still do them every two or three weeks, like a kind of scrum bun. So they have a bigger cycle where they do some of the scrum rituals, but within that cycle they try to work in a Kanban way. So they do it every two or three weeks when they are finishing an iteration. And there are also teams who try to do it whenever there's a need for that, whenever they are triggered. So it might be an issue that pops up at the stand-up, which triggers the people to say, hey, we... We need to do something about this. This is something that won't go away on its own. So we need to take a look at this and to take action. And then they will do that retrospective as a result of the stand-up. Decide to come together to look at the issue and to decide how to take action. So they fit perfectly well also in the Kanban way of working. And they will also match with the lean way of working in Agile. It's a general practice which you can use. I actually started doing retrospectives when we were working with Rob at the organization. And we were doing iterations, so it was helpful for us to decide what to do differently in the next iteration. But we weren't working Agile at that time. We were just using RUB as a way to deliver products. And even there, retrospectives proved to be valuable already because we could do it during the project and reap the benefits already during the project from doing the retrospectives.
I think to get value out of retrospectives, you need somebody who's really focusing on the retrospective. And that person should be focusing both on the retrospective meeting, making sure that that's a good meeting, and also focusing on the follow-up from the retrospective. So the actions that are coming out of there to see if those actions are actually being done in the organization and to keep the team sharp on doing those actions in the next iteration.
And I think it's important in an organization to have people who are really good in this. And I prefer to have people appointed or named as those are the people who should be facilitating your retrospectives. It could be scrum masters from other teams. Who are cross-facilitating the retrospective. It could be HR coaches in the organization, quality managers or process managers that you have in your organization who are capable of doing this. Flow manager would also be a great person to do this because he's focusing on the flow in the team, the flow in the organization, and really focusing on helping the team in there. So there's different roles who could perform this ritual. It's important to have somebody who's really focusing on getting value out of this meeting.
A large organization that I worked with had retrospective facilitators, both from the quality and process department, but they also had members from architecture for instance and had some of the scrum masters who will be doing retrospectives and what we did is we came together every two three weeks and we exchanged our experiences how those retrospectives went what kind of technique did we use what kind of exercise how did it go how did the team react on that was it valuable so we continuously learned from each other learned new ways to do it as retrospective facilitators and we could help the teams through that. We also rotated on the team. So sometimes one person would do the retrospective and the other time another facilitator would do the retrospective. So we tried to rotate on teams to have teams also experience different facilitators helping them to find improvements that would help them. And I think that turned out to be a great way to really embed retrospectives in your organization and to get more value out of them. And we exchanged our experiences, how those retrospectives went, what kind of technique did we use, what kind of exercise, how did it go, how did the team react on that, was it valuable. So we continuously learned from each other, learned new ways to do it as retrospective facilitators and we could help the teams through that. And we also rotated on the team, so sometimes one person would do the retrospective and the other time another facilitator would do the retrospective. So we tried to rotate on teams to have teams also experience different facilitators, helping them to find improvements that would help them. And I think that turned out to be a great way to really embed retrospectives in your organization and to get more value out of them.
I think it's also important when you do the retrospectives is to evaluate them and to see how they are going. And what I often do is I just take time at the end of the retrospective, just a couple of minutes, to check with the people in the room and see, okay, how did this go? So I would simply ask them, what do you think? Do you think that we got the right actions out of this? Do you think this meeting was helpful? Was it a good meeting? Was the time well spent? And usually people would say, yes, this was valuable, this was helpful, this really helped us to find some things in there. We discovered something important, so yes, this is good stuff. If not, it was a trigger for me to check with the people and to see what we should be doing differently the next time with the retrospective. And actually this also helps you to get buy-in in the team because I heard people saying, okay, we've stopped doing retrospectives because we've been doing the same thing over and over again and people aren't interested anymore to do them. When you do this and people will say in the meeting, yes, this was valuable, then my follow-up question is, okay, so we're going to be doing this next time? We're going to be doing this next week? Usually they don't object to that. They just said that this was valuable, so why not do it again? So it helps you if you evaluate the retrospective to get buy-in from the people in the room and to make sure that you can keep on doing retrospectives with your teams.
So what is the business value that an organization can get from doing retrospectives? What would be the bigger benefit for an organization to get out of this? And I've looked at this to see what could be the things if you would really look at business terms. And I think... At the end, retrospectives can help to improve the velocity and productivity in organizations because you're improving teams, you're finding ways for them to work better, and it can actually also improve the quality of your products and bring down your costs. But I think initially, if you want to get benefits out of retrospective, I think it's good to focus on the first things in here, the effective rework and better collaboration. I think that's the kind of benefits that I, as a product owner, but also as a business owner, would like to see coming out of retrospectives. If the collaboration will improve, if people will work together and find ways to work together better, if they find ways to collaborate with their stakeholders, with the product owner, if there are any issues in there and they find ways to solve them,
that will really bring the benefits that are described below. If they find ways to do teamwork.
I think that will really help to get the bigger benefits out of there looking at velocity and productivity. And I think retrospectives, as I mentioned earlier, will help you to improve your processes. By the way, process for me is the way that people are working in the organization. It could be something easy as a definition of done and agile, which just stated, this is how we're doing our work as a team. For me, that's the process. And retrospectives would help to improve the process, to find better ways to do your work. And sometimes you also would like to document that. So I would like to see some of the actions reflecting back, for instance, on the definition of done. If you've done a retrospective, then I would expect to see some changes occasionally on the definition of done, as you will be doing things differently in there. And I think that's a way to document that.
Will it help to bring down lead time? Yes, but again, when you're focusing on collaboration, when you're focusing on the way you're working together as a team, If your productivity goes up, then you will be able to deliver things quicker, and that will reduce your lead time to deliver functionality. So at the end, I think the business benefits are there, and I think we can actually prove them that they can result from retrospectus. But you shouldn't be focusing on those business benefits when you're doing the retrospective. You should actually be focusing on the people aspects in your team, on the teamwork, on the collaboration. Get to those benefits that you want to have as an organization. And that's also what I'm telling managers if they want to do retrospectives in their organization. I tell them, don't look at the actions, look at the fact that teams are doing retrospectives. Make sure that they take the time to do it in there. Reach out to the teams to ask them if you can help them. If there's anything that you could change in the organization to make life easier for them. And at the end, look at the bigger benefits if indeed product quality and velocity is increasing and if costs are going down in the organization. But don't focus on that on the actions. Let the team decide what they think would be the good things to do in there to do their work better.
As I mentioned earlier, I think it's important to do different exercises in retrospective.
One of the reasons for that is to prevent that retrospectives are becoming boring and that people are doing the same way to do the retrospective over and over again. You don't want that. But I think another reason will also be that teams are different. Teams are not the same and teams will also change when they are adopting Agile. They're on an Agile journey. So there might be actions which make sense when teams are just starting, but there might be completely different actions for a team to do once they are on the way. And to get really valuable actions out of the Agile retrospective, I think it helps to pick an exercise, pick a technique that really helps the team. On the things that they are dealing with at that point in time. So that's why I say every retrospective facilitator should have a toolbox of retrospective exercises, a toolbox of possible techniques that he or she can do with the team. And then in the retrospective meeting, pick the best one or combine some of the tools in that meeting. To design the retrospective and to say how you're going to be doing it with that team, given the situation at hand at that time. And the easiest way to have a toolbox is to have the book with you. That's the kind of toolbox. But there are also other ways to have the different exercises to try them out. But it's important to have those exercises. And I think it's also important for facilitators to improvise during a meeting if you see the need for that. Really be focused on how can I help the team to get most value out of this retrospective in the situation that we are right now. Now, this is a list of exercises that you can do in retrospectives. There are many more. There are a couple of good websites also which are describing retrospective exercises and where you can look at. Also, the books from Diana Larson and Esther Derby describe exercises. The one from Norm Kent has a lot of exercise in there. So there's plenty of stuff there. On the kind of exercise or techniques that you can do to do retrospectives. Most of them are linked in here actually also to my blog, so you can also read more information about the exercise in there. And the presentation is already on SlideShare, so you can access everything in there. And I think it's important to have different exercises and to pick the one which is most suitable and to play around with it. And that's the reason that we wrote a book on that, to really focus on having those exercises in there. So the idea behind the book, and we're going to be doing some of the exercise from this book right now, is to have a set of exercises for a retrospective facilitator, so a scrum master or an HR coach,
When he's preparing a retrospective to take a look and to say, okay, this This is the exercises that I would like to use right now. That would help me to do a valuable retrospective meeting and then to do the retrospective meeting using that.
Okay, are there any questions right now on the how and why of retrospectives?
Yeah?
I think you need facilitation because it can be difficult to really reflect on the way of working and be focused on getting good outcomes out of there and to see what's happening in the team. And if the team is doing a retrospective, they will really be focused on the things that they would like to change. So there's a personal part in there for every team member. Even for the scrum master, he might have some ideas on what he would like to have changed in the team or what he would like to have done in there. So when you have an independent facilitator in there who is purely focused on the meeting and purely focused on getting the best out of the people who are there, in that meeting, that would help to find better actions in there. So it's in the independence, it's in the meeting, It's also in the exercises. I think there are situations where people from the team can do retrospectives. I've worked in teams where we had people in there who have been facilitating a lot of retrospectives. We would do it on a rotating base. So we would say, okay, you're going to be facilitating this retrospective. And the person would also be joining it as a team member. But I think certainly when teams are starting with retrospectives, it's better to have an independent facilitator in there. And it could be the HR coach initially who's helping the teams on their HR journey. And the only thing that person is focusing upon, how can I help the team to get better? And it doesn't matter what the action will be, as long as it will be the right thing for the team. That's the idea behind that.
Other questions?
Okay, so next up, I'm going to be doing a couple of exercises with you. So we're going to be doing a workshop, which means we're also going to be changing the furniture because I want you to split up in teams, teams of something like seven, eight people. And I think we have something like 25 people in there, so I would like to split up in three teams. I think the group...