I’ve been feeling pretty great about our Retrospectives, on the surface they seem to be doing a lot of good. Lots of discussion, input from everyone, laughter, food and some interesting actions to come out of them. It’s always been noted that actions speak louder than words, and for the Retrospectives to go well, the actions have to be followed through. Which I thought was happening, though here and there, meetings would go a miss or get pushed back.
One particular example is the action, “Kick off Knowledge Sharing sessions on a Wednesday” – designed to fill the afternoon where we sort of have ‘free reign’. It’s after the Wednesday morning release, but before the next Sprint starts on Thursday morning. It was well-meaning enough. Come Wednesday afternoon the meeting didn’t happen.
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out why, and stumbled upon this brilliant blog “Finding Marbles“. So I’m glad for the challenge as it introduced me to Corinna and her excellent blog/tools for Scrum Masters. Using the ‘SMART’ theory made noticing where I could have improved a piece of cake.
- Specific: ‘Knowledge Sharing Sessions’ was not specific. During the time we should have been in the meeting, I spoke to individual Team members, and it turns out they all have different ideas on what ‘Knowledge Sharing’ even means, what it was meant to achieve or how it should be presented – down to personal differences in learning styles. So when everyone was nodding their heads in the Retrospective, they were agreeing to different things, all met by the vague goal I wrote down.
- Measurable: All the team had different ideas on what the session was meant to achieve, and different takes on the phrase ‘T-shaped’; ranging from knowledge about another area, ability to help out, > ability to actually do and pick up a ticket in an unfamiliar area to their usual expertise.
- Achievable: Nope. This was an important learning. The meeting was set for Wednesday afternoon, when we believed we had some flexible time to improve the team. In reality, by Wednesday afternoon, after a morning of meetings in the form of Retrospective and Sprint Planning (plus this particular Wednesday an extra refinement session), all our brains were too fried to go into a fourth meeting, whether we wanted it or not. I talk a lot about ‘Energy Management‘ and this should have been a red flashing light for me.
- Relevant – this is the one we 100% got, the action had its heart in the right place and was a good one for the Retrospective.
- Time-Bound: Again, no – I previously had no set plan to follow-up on this. I do check in with our Retrospective Actions daily, but it feels like the Team should be aware of a ‘Review’ date as it were too.
There were two suggestions in the ‘Finding Marbles‘ blog post I linked to which I actioned immediately on this one. I deleted the Weekly ‘Knowledge Sharing Session’ meeting I’d original put in, and I created a ‘Trial’ session on a Thursday Morning. The Trial Session is centered around our QA, which I’ve set up with him (assigning the action to someone in the team is another suggestion from Corinna!) to demonstrate his work on a particular ticket. I have to be honest, I still don’t have ‘Measurable’ down – but the team were a lot happier with this more specific, more realistic action.
Scrummastery 