Scrum Retrospective meeting — use some metaphore
When people don’t talk on meetings anymore
Introduction
In our company we are using scrum framework and for our team I am the scrum master. At the end of every sprint we are having retrospective meeting and all the other ceremonies (meetings) that scrum has defined. In this article I will write about our meetings and the issue that I was facing: nobody talks anymore.
I am using the pretty standard template for retrospective, where we are using few columns to define what was good, what can be improved, what failed and some others. This approach is effective and worked amazing specially for the first time. People were active, everyone talked for the whole time and we had many action points for the next sprint. Second time, it was still pretty good, but the excitement was decreasing. After few more meetings it was a boring stereotype. Nobody said anything anymore. People were doing their action points, but on the actual meeting nobody said a thing. Now in the current lock down situation, handling such meeting only via online call is a struggle as well.
We used a little activity called ESPV. Where people define how they feel about such meeting and they choose from options
- E — Explorers (Are eager to discover new ideas and insights)
- S — Shoppers (Will look over all the available information and be happy to go home with one useful new idea)
- V — Vacationers (Aren’t interested in the work of the retrospective, but are happy to be away from the daily grind)
- P — Prisoners (Feel they have been forced to attend and would rather be doing something else)
Source for the ESPV for more details is here:
The majority in our team were prisoners and something needed to be done.
Investigation
I remember from one of my scrum trainings, that you should ask people if everything is perfect and they don’t need to improve anymore. To find the reason why they don’t speak anymore. Usually the team knows that there is still space to improve, however that did not bring any inputs for the meeting in my case. So I searched for advice and I found some concepts, but there is a very little amount of specific solutions that could be applied for online meeting.
There was one that I liked. Use metaphores to distract from the stereotype meeting, but of course there was no specific example.
I have come up with a train metaphore and it worked nicely. And that is the reason, why I want to share it, because I was not able to find anything like it.
Solution — trains
I was thinking about some topic that is general enough for all the team members and I thought about trains. Probably everyone traveled using train and knows the up and downs of it. So I decided to think about the last sprint as a train ride.
At the beginning of the meeting, I gave a little quiz about the longest train rail in the world and with this quiz I have introduced the topic. Also people were suprised there is some quiz question and it started their interest.
After that I have explained the train idea and reminded, that the goal of this excercise is to take a look at our sprint from another view and improve as a team.
I gave few examples how they can think about it such as
- The train was late
- It missed few stops
- It was too fast
- There was no space to sit
And after few examples I gave them time to think about it. Everyone came up with something. Some had only one more complex situation, others had more smaller inputs and the debate started again. We talked about the metaphores, some of them were just silly to spice up the meeting a little bit, but between them there were some more serious, that pointed out at real problems that were discussed after.
Conclusion
This excercise improved the situation for now. After this meeting we had the ESPV activity and there were no prisoners for this meeting anymore. However I have played this card already I will need another ideas for time, when the standard retrospective feels as stereotype again. I hope you can take it as an inspiration and customize it to your team needs. Wish you good luck and keep making scrum meetings interesting, especially in corporation environment, people tend to forget that it can significantly increase the team efficiency.
PS: Sorry for any grammar mistakes, english is not my mother language :)