Look to book a meeting around five days or one week after your project or sprint ends. This should be enough time for the dust to settle and for everyone to gather their thoughts. Now, you may be wondering, ‘When should you should a retrospective meeting? ’ It’s a fair question to ask as the timing of meetings can greatly impact their effectiveness and outcome.

This document is used during a meeting that is held for the purpose of breaking down the results and experienced circumstances to evaluate and assess for improvement. Traditional, in-person retrospectives usually involve a whiteboard, some post-it notes, and some markers in a meeting room. Now, with increasingly hybrid and remote working environments, it’s not always possible to be in the same room. Even if you’re meeting in-person project retrospective a digital collaboration platform like Mural is your best friend. It’s essential to have an established framework for gathering and recording ideas, as well as a culture based on psychological safety, to ensure that your team feels comfortable giving honest feedback. Hold a retrospective whenever you want to gather information about your project, evaluate how the work is going, or understand why it went the way it did.

Browse more posts

A sprint retrospective is a meeting after a sprint to discuss the lacks and factors that went well during a sprint cycle. This method allows a team to argue and converse about the elements that are relevant and productive. The sprint retrospective is a critical component of the scrum framework for creating, implementing, and managing large-scale projects. A retrospective is a structured way to gather knowledge, insights, metrics, and artifacts from a completed project, phase, or development iteration. Even in daily life, taking the time to reflect on why something unpleasant happened helps you to avoid a recurrence. Continuous improvement can only happen when someone reflects on previous work and can assess it without the pressure of deadlines or sprint length.

With that in mind, here are some of the top retrospective tools on the market today. While most retrospectives will follow the format above, there are different types of retrospectives that each have their own specific elements. Usually, it’s the meat of the retrospective — the information collection stage — that’ll be the most different. Here are 4 different frameworks for running this part of your retrospective. To ensure everyone has an equal chance to speak, you can either have each person go over all their ideas at once or share a single idea in turn. If multiple people have similar ideas, make sure they don’t take too much time talking about duplicates.

Goals

It assists the assigned team to brainstorm on how to enhance the event for future purposes. Step two opens the floor to a discussion between the development team and stakeholders. This discussion should serve to bring stakeholders up to date with the project progress, provide added business context to the developers, and motivate the development team by reinforcing why they are building the product. Step one tasks the team with presenting what work was completed during the sprint. As the nature of scrum dictates that the team can only present completed products or increments, the development team can demonstrate features to the stakeholders for evaluation.

But it’s a gold standard for a reason—sprint retrospectives can be challenging without a solid game plan and a few visuals to help along the way. Of course, the presence of goals is required in retrospective meetings since it is the key element that gives the team direction. It focuses on the past event, allowing you to obtain experiences you can evaluate to see your strengths and weaknesses. With this technique, you can ensure self-development and set self-goals. A team retrospective is a regular activity involving, the gathering of data, discussions regarding past activities and projects, and daily performance. It allows the team to determine their lacks and generate plans that fill the gap.

How should a retrospective be conducted?

Leveraging the latest models, Miro Assist speeds up work, so that teams can focus on analysis, driving alignment, and execution. Foster a customer-centric mindset and build a mutual team space, where everyone can capture insights, structure them with diagrams and tables, and share it all in a central spot. Something that often gets overlooked is the effect retrospectives have on your team’s mental health.

• The meeting duration depends on several factors such as team size, the experience of the team, if the team is remotely located, etc.
• The sprint retrospective meeting is held at the end of the sprint (usually after the sprint review meeting) and before the sprint planning for the next sprint.
• Alternatively, a slight change to the criteria of an existing award may result in retrospective awards being presented to persons who would have won the award under present rules.
• Sharing major takeaways is a great way to make sure everyone’s informed and working towards the same goals.

This part of the retrospective does not need to be a discussion, rather you can examine the initial goals and objectives and see if you hit all of your targets or not. Retros help the team as a whole, and its members, gather their thoughts and opinions on a recent project. Often, we move from project to project or task to task without taking the time to sit and reflect. An effective retrospective can thus be an incredibly beneficial way to help us improve our ways of working, especially when it comes to teams. I like, I wish, what if is a design thinking technique designed to collect actionable feedback quickly and easily. You can open it up at the end of a project, workshop, meeting or even marketing concept or design to quickly gauge team feedback.

Taking time to show appreciation for a job well done and praise one another is another way to bolster morale. During product testing, it’s vital that you record all feedback, both positive and negative, so that nothing slips through the cracks. A Feedback Capture Grid is a great way to collect this feedback collaboratively online. The grid is divided into four quadrants, Likes, Criticisms, Questions and Ideas, and can be easily filled-in using digital sticky notes. The Starfish Retrospective can help you identify what each team member got out of a certain project or sprint. This is a great way to build understanding within team members and understand where each others priorities lie.

Participants should walk away from the retrospective with a better sense of how the project was experienced by everyone involved. It is an opportunity for customer support to share how they were inundated with complaints about a clunky rollout or how the UX team delivered really clear wireframes that sped up the coding process. Many come from the Agile software development community, but the practices apply no matter what kind of project you run.