What is a retrospective?
The word retrospective comes from the Latin word, retrospectare, which means to “look back”. It is not, however an exersize in nostalgia. The purpose is to learn from the past to do better moving forward.
At a retrospective meeting, the team looks back at the previous sprint/period/delivery/project and inspects what can be done to improve in the future. In agile companies, a retrospective meeting will be held at the end of each sprint period which is normally every 2-4 weeks.
The process
The typical process for holding a retrospective meeting would be to collect input from team members, process this input in the team and then follow-up to ensure the items collected would not occur again. This way a team/company or project can continuously improve. As a facilitator or scrum master, you must ensure the retrospective is using knowledge about the past in order to look forward and learn. A retrospective must not turn into blaming or pointing fingers at each others, otherwise it’s your responsibility as a facilitator to turn this round to constructive discussions.
How do I choose which kind of retrospective to do?
Onlineretrospectives.com is designed to make it easier for you to get an overview of different retrospectives, pros & cons for each and with easy-to-copy images so you can spend more time helping your team instead of inventing new methods.
Your teams needs will change and develop over time, which is why you will find retrospectives on this site that are categorized in creative, easy, foolproof and games, to make it easier to find what could be the perfect retrospective for your team in their current situation.
A changing world
Ultimately it’s up to you as the scrum master or facilitator to gauge what you team will benefit from at each meeting. Working in an agile organization in a changing world you may need to abandon you plans and make new ones. But don’t worry – you can always get a lot of help by asking and listening to your team.
Typically retrospective facilitation relies on physical meetings but in a changing world, we experience more and more distributed teams which makes it more difficult to hold a successful retrospective. We hope this website will give you inspiration and useful advice for performing good retrospectives for use in online meetings and/or in distributed teams.
Good luck.
Katrine and Jakob