This is a semi-self-paced retro designed to be done within 60-75 minutes. It uses the board from the boardgame Clue as a metaphor. This retro was designed for use on Mural or Miro after witnessing really uninspiring retros online that didn’t do any examination into underlying causations before deciding on actions. You start in the Hall to open the retro. Here you could do a…
Debunking Multitasking with Cards
Each team (or organization), has 4 items (stories or projects) to complete. We will simulate these by placing suits of cards in order. Materials For every 5 people, you’ll need a deck of cards and a stopwatch that provides a means of capturing lap time (often now on telephones as an app). A flip chart and markers to record times for each round would be…
Pair Poetry
This is an exercise to help people understand why pair programming works; in particular why it produces better code. It has some usefulness for helping technical team members understand this, but I have found it even better for helping managers understand why pair collaboration works. Each team of two needs Rory’s Story Dice (or other forms of picture dice). I suppose picture-oriented cards shuffled and…
Art Gallery Retrospective
This is a retrospective technique I learned from Esther Derby and Jerry Weinberg. I’ve extended it a bit differently into the analysis and deciding what to do portions as they were using the technique as a debrief mechanism for an activity in the PSL course. This technique is particularly useful for multi-team/large groups. It will take about 120 minutes to run in full. One may…
Newspaper Retro
Background This is an idea I presented at the Retrospective Facilitator’s Gathering in May 2019. Newspaper articles tell stories based on facts. So this retrospective idea is to use this metaphor to capture data, analyze it, and decide on some actions. In some ways, it is similar to the team co-creating an A3 report. Each person is a reporter bringing the news back and then…