Retrospective inspired by the TV-show and board game of Jeopardy with easy, medium and difficult questions in 7 different categories. You can customize the questions and categories to fit your team. In my team they liked it so much they want to continue the retrospective another day.
Materials
https://www.onlineretrospectives.com/jeopardy/jeopardy.html (with standard topics and questions in the following categories: About me, learning, communication, retrospectives, your company, customers and processes)
Remember to download the questions using the button below:
OR create you own themes here by changing the 7 topics:
Pressing the button above will give you a link for the game by opening the link in a new browser window. You may keep this link for the actual retrospective in the browsers favorites and it will then work directly when starting the retrospective. If you create your own topics, you will need to write your own questions for the team.
Pros
- Fun game and simple game that is easily understood by everyone
- You can customize the themes and create your own questions. In my team I created a “Mystery” category. For some of the categories I also kept a few extra questions to have a bigger chance of asking the team the relevant questions.
- You can add another layer to the retrospective by asking the team why they only chose the easy questions or if there were particular categories in which they were most interested
Cons
- Limited by the questions specified, although you can write your own questions and topics
- Use of categories might exclude other subjects that would be relevant and interesting for the team
Duration
Approximately 1 hour – or you can stop anytime you like.
Preparation
Open up the link under “materials” above. Look at the categories and the downloaded questions as you will be reading these. Check if you think the team will agree with the questions or adjust categories/topics and questions if needed.
Step-by-step
Someone shares their screen and control the mouse.
The team will take turns instructing the screen-sharer which tiles to chose by naming the category and the difficulty level. You or a team member clicks the tile.
The facilitator reads the corresponding question, either from the pre-defined questions which you can download above, or the customized questions you have prepared yourself.
I asked the team the questions. You could also ask the person whose turn it is to answer, and you may ask the rest of the team to add to the answers.
You may continue until all tiles have been turned. If you want to stop the retrospective earlier, you can stop anytime you want. You do not need to play the game to the end but can stop at anytime.
Tips:
– Does your team need to get something off their chest before starting the game? Consider starting out with a short round where everybody shares what they’ve encountered since last time.
– If your team tend to answer the questions as fast as possible and just want to get on then consider asking follow-up questions.
– If your team dwells too long at each question, it might be because it’s important for the team – or you might want to set a timer per question.
Contributors
Game invented and developed by Jakob and Katrine, OnlineRetrospectives.com