Remote Retrospective Exercise example, using online google drawing documents

Having distributed team members is always a challenge  in many aspects in a scrum team. One of the challenges is performing a meaningful effective and with good results retrospective.  Using online techniques is one of the ways we can achieve that. This blog post will provide an example of an exercise performed few weeks ago with distributed scrum team.

This exercise executes Ilio Krumins-Beens technique in his article Facilitating Retrospectives with Remote Attendees using Google Drawing in 5 Easy Steps , but not only

**  This specific scrum team was created for a specific one time sprint, in this case they will not continue together as a team , so the goal of the retrospective exercise was to gather insights and suggestions to be used further down the road when forming  the next gen of scrum teams.

First up :

Google drawing templates for the session is created and shared in advanced with the team members.

Using google drawing allows all team members to work on a shared board , while view online results and outcomes and at the same time benefit from a good visibility and a relevant discussion over current retrospective events.

Each team member is seated by his own PC, using headphones and proper online communication.

1. Create virtual retro google template with sprint timeline and mood icons.

 2. "Create virtual retro board and pre-create blank stickies and voting chips for each participant in advance of meeting.  Alternatively, you can open the Remote Retrospective Template* in Google (you'll need to 'Make a Copy' to be able to edit it). " 

Set the stage : Est. 10 min

Introduce retrospective technique and goal.

Next : Use the virtual retro google template with sprint timeline and mood icons.

*This short exercise goal is to give a brief view to all participants over the overall mood of the sprint , acting as a teaser to the next exercise of collecting relevant information related to it.

The wonderful thing with this exercise is the fact that it is being done anonymously and yet we get good feeling over team members mood and view over the sprint .

Ask the team member to take 3 min and to silently place icons through the sprint timeline reflecting their mood during the spring.

Each team member should also glade the total score of sprint mood.

• As a coach Reflect what we see.

• Ask for short response if there are any thoughts.

Gather data E2E:

Set Up - Est. 10 Min

Use the  virtual retro board . Explain How to Use The Board and ask each team member to create  his own create  space on the board.

"If this is the first time your participants are using Google Drawing, take a few minutes to show them the basics.  Although the tool is very intuitive, you will lower anxiety by showing how easy it is to: drag a shape >  double-click to edit > enter text."

I realized that team members just love this boar. Each member creates his /hers own creative space on the board , changing colors and adding pictures. This part was a really fun part .

Step 2: Create and Add Stickies reflecting each team member thought- Est. 10 Min

I time-box this part of the retrospective to 10 minutes.  Each person adds their thoughts (1 per stickie) to the his personal space Stickies .

Step 3: presenting items and listening to the pain - Est. 40 Min

Each team member presets shortly ( 1-5 min) his/her items and adds it to the 4 different areas on the board  for item. 

*Make sure ,adding  good things is also a must

**Because of the nature of this current team sprint and the general mood chart results (unhappy team mood for this sprint)  it was highly important to hear each and every team member thought instead of just performing other silent less time consuming techniques for gathering huge amount of data. 

***You can also do this exercise differently using    silent grouping

While the discussion progress group similar stickies raised  together.

This exercise facilitation should be carefully handled , pointing out main pain/ gain issues while team members presents this view .      

*We were able to identify the most painful issues while adding the insights to the board.

Optional : Step 4: prioritize items  - 10 min

Optional for this exercise :After all items have been read, each person can assign 3 "voting chips" to the groupings that they think are more important.

Take time to discuss winning items.

*We didn’t take this step, since we were able to identify the most painful issues while adding the insights to the board.

Instead , we asked team members to add suggestions for solutions

Step 5 : Suggestions and identify actions - -Est. 10 Min - 30 Min

As a group, discuss the groupings of items starting with the items that received the most votes or with those identified during the session. Suggest which activities the team wants to continue and what the team wants to do differently.  Identify a few action items that the team can commit to in the upcoming iteration. In addition for further discussion , suggest ways of improvement.

  

Reference:

Remote Retrospective Board by Ilio Krumins-Beens & Terrence McGovern is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/17cyx7QZJLpMIoVHsdlAldXfgU-cPdIg9v_XlVhhtkZU/edit?usp=sharing.

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A facilitator is literally defined as “one who helps others learn or who helps make things easy.”  A business facilitator helps participants to collaborate as they explore a topic or issue.  The goal is to encourage participants to think productively and ultimately to articulate key ideas, to ask vital questions, to uncover variables, to find solutions, and/or to identify productive actions.

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Failing is Part of it: How to Succeed in Making Mistakes?

**Taken from from The Coaching Booster Book 

When I have autonomy I grow. Yes, and mainly when I have room for experimentation and making mistakes. 

“The only way to never fail is to never try” or “we learn from our mistakes” – these are sentences we believe many of us hear again and again since our childhood. Making room for trying and making mistakes is one of the things we believe in the most. After all, we all make mistakes, all the time. The question is do we learn from our mistakes? Meaning: do we truly learn? And the more important question is do we know how to make mistakes in order to learn? 
Don’t avoid making mistakes. Really, don’t. We even recommend you feel free to make mistakes. Don’t stop trying even if it means making mistakes. 

The idea is to know how to fail well.

Shirly’s son for instance, he’s a champion in computer games. The kind that have levels, adventures, where the main player gains power and knowledge … . And he didn’t start playing from the highest level and become a champ without making mistakes, right? He kept failing, correcting, repeating, re-experiencing, getting better, failing gain. And in the end he feels on top of the world. Why? Because it’s OK to fail and correct. Because he has the space, the legitimacy and autonomy to fail. His feeling of uccess comes from his ability to correct and make progress. There’s nothing like small failures and small successes as part of an experience to make us feel capable and successful. 

Same goes with ourselves and our coachee. Our ability to grow derives from our experiences. But not just any experience – it’s our ability to fail, to correct, try again and get better … . We don’t have to get frightened and shy away every time we make a mistake. We do have to be brave, take a good look at our mistake and work to improve on it. 

So how to succeed in making mistakes?

1. Don’t be afraid to try.

How do people become master sportsmen? How does someone become a master at any field? By trying. A lot. Trying that comes from the ability to learn and get better. Fear is one of the most powerful inhibitors to learning new things – use it. 

2. By making small steps, 

our mistakes will also be smaller, more digestible and easier to fix. They will also increase our sense of autonomy to make mistakes. Just like in a computer game. Small mistakes are more controllable, they teach us more. They are also less scary, less noisy and surely less harmful. 

3. Inspecting our experiences and our mistakes is another important part of knowing how to make mistakes.

After all, we wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice, would we?! Our mistakes are vital for our continuous improvement. They are great learning tools, because they provide us with a perfect picture of our actual reality, rather than what our reality should theoretically be. This is why looking at our mistakes and asking what we have learned from them, what we should stop doing and what we should start doing differently is a good and brave way to learn. Cooking can be a good example for this. Is a recipe perfect the first time we try it? Or do we need to retry and refine it several times until we find just the right ingredients for our palette, until we discover the “right mix” for us? 

4. Sometimes we’ll make small, controlled experiments, so we can test how reality responds to the change we want to make. 

But this will be a small experiment, so if we fail we can learn, correct and try to make it better. Small mistakes which entail some preliminary probing of the reality that awaits us, are both controllable and helpful to our learning. 

5. From big mistakes – which regrettably will happen – we also ought to learn. 

We won’t punish ourselves for our past mistakes. It’s important for us to look back at the past, take from it what helped us get past difficult times and learn what not to repeat. 

6. By making mistakes we learn how to avoid some of them in the future. 


And… Don’t forget to enjoy the journey.


So…Fail fast, fail often 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/books/review-the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html?_r=0

References and further reading: Failing Better, Mike Langlois¹ 

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