A Guide to Sprint Retrospectives with a Distributed Team, by Lena Shenkarenko
As teams become more distributed, running Sprint Retrospectives becomes challenging. But this is not a reason to quit doing them. Here are some tips from RealtimeBoard and Lieuwe van Brug fromLerni.io, who has practiced running retrospectives with distributed teams many times.
Step 1: Attendance and Engagement
Be creative and surprise the team while organizing the retrospective — you’ll get a lot of different feedback.
Retrospectives are a lot about emotions, attitude, etc. This is easily lost in a distributed environment. To solve this — partially — you could use good cameras and make sure everybody is visible during the retrospective. Asking more explicitly on emotional subjects can improve the situation as well.
Step 2: Sprint Review
Choose subjects you want to focus on during a retrospective. One subject per sprint. If you focus on different subjects every sprint, you donʼt get the same problems mentioned every time.
Step 3: Discussion
Itʼs important to catch everyone’s opinions. One of the things you can do is to give everybody a personal part on RealtimeBoard. Copy the visuals you are going to use during the retrospective per person and let every person zoom in on their personal part of the board. In the discussion rounds you assemble all input to a central place on the board. This way you make sure everybody is heard.
Step 4: Actionable Commitments
Make sure that you prioritize what to solve in one sprint. Small achievable goals work better and are sustainable over longer periods of time.
A tool that will help you to go through all these steps with the distributed team is an online whiteboard. It offers all the benefits of a traditional whiteboard, while giving all participants an unhindered view with the ability to add and edit information in real-time. To start your next retrospective, just choose one of pre-made templates, some of which are discussed below.
Template 1. Start, Stop, Continue
Participants identify actions that they wantto start doing in the next iteration, and those from the previous iteration that they want to stop doing, or continue doing.
Template 2. Glad, Sad, Mad
Each participant is then given the opportunity to describe their observations and place it on a whiteboard. The whiteboard is divided into three areas: Glad, Sad and Mad.
Template 3. Sailboat
Here a Sprint is compared to a sailboat. The team records things that helped the Sprint move forward or slowed it down and place them either on the sail or below the boat, indicating that they are anchors or wind.
You can read the article in full, find some additional tips and pre-made templates here:https://realtimeboard.com/blog/distributed-team-sprint-retrospective/