Agile Retros Making Good Teams Great

After reading Agile Retrospectives making good teams great it has triggered some intended and un-indented consequences. Often it is too easy to get caught up in the technical delivery that we fail to go back to basics. This book is an excellent reference point for anyone in the position of facilitating a retrospective or wanting to inspect and adapt on sprint, iteration or project.

One of the simplest takeaways for me is to document the team values and working agreements that act as the social contracts that bind a team together defining the behaviour and interactions. For example, mobile phones are silent in meetings/not replying to Slack/Teams in ceremonies. These simple agreements can help mitigate conflict and are something that can be facilitated through a retrospective.

The same old activities lose their zest. If you're bored with the same activity, chances are your team is too.

There is only so much start, stop, and continue a team can take. More intentionally the book provides excellent examples for different use cases and activities to capture data, generate insight and decide what to do.

The remainder of this post will synthesise my own work looking at agile maturity with the key points from Esther Derby and Diana Larsen - Leadership Agility Advisor book.