Retrospectives in a Virtual world
I am a passionate agile practitioner who believes that if there is a “secret sauce” to high performing teams, it is psychological safety and great retrospectives.
Despite having worked in a distributed team environment since 2008 I suddenly found myself worried about team engagement in a virtual world, that had been filled with panic and uncertainty. I wanted to help my teams with a “Ready to go” Retro bag so they had a few tips and techniques at their finger tips and could have fun with it!
Pivot from Physical -> Virtual Stickies and Why
In January 2020, I joined Paciolan as an Agile Coach and was delighted to find 95% of their teams to be colocated. What a luxury! I quickly gravitated to white boarding a lot with my teams and running in-person retrospectives and other workshops with lots and lots of sticky notes. Then came Covid and it changed everything …
- A ScrumMaster in our organization had been helping all of our development teams with facilitating the team’s Retrospectives for over a year now.
- After showing them the way, we were getting ready to hand this back to the teams and had been working on a “Physical Retro Bag” to give the teams some tips and tricks. But now with Covid becoming a reality we had to pivot and create a “Virtual Retro Bag”.
Finding a “Good Enough” solution
I am a recovering perfectionist that found myself in a situation where I had to quickly find a tool that fit our purpose and setup a “Virtual Retro Bag”. This is where Jamboards came to the rescue! Having recently used Jamboards in a collaborative workshop at Paciolan I fell in love with it’s simplicity. Although not perfect, it was good enough to get the teams going.
Virtual Retro Bag: https://jamboard.google.com/d/1bSs7Ezq2LNWMR09ODOyGMEb79cUqy6Sj2ymApXWweSw/viewer?f=1
It includes:
- The value of Retrospectives (inspired by Esther Derby’s Slideshare)
- A 5 step retrospective framework (from Esther Derby & Diana Larsen’s Agile Retrospectives book) with some additional tips for my teams
- A combination of Retrospectives, Team check-ins, Icebreakers and Futurespective tools and techniques for teams to have fun with
I hope you find this Virtual Bag helpful. “Copy” the Jamboard and create your own version of it and empower your teams to run great retrospectives.
