How many of the action items that you capture in a retrospective review do you end up doing?
Some. All. None.
Whether you call them retrospectives or lessons learned or reviews, it’s a key practice that aids in becoming more effective and resilient.
It’s important to periodically take a step back and reflect. Important whether it’s a product team, a business team, or an operational team.
There are many ways to reflect. On what is working or not working. What was discovered and what is still unknown. What do you need to stop, start of continue. I’m sure you know other methods of review.
All these paths lead to identifying actions to take as an outcome of the reflection.
I watched a webinar recently on Agile retrospectives. Partly because I was catching up on my Scrum Master cert SEU credits. And frankly because I do want to improve my retrospectives.
I was reminded in the webinar of the Agile Manifesto Principle around retrospectives.
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
I was also reminded in the webinar that a lot of teams (and individuals) only do the first half. They forget to do the second half.
Hmmm.
Easy enough to do. We step back and reflect. Often offsite or outside of normal running. We write it all down…. And then we file it away. Until the next period review.
Unless we actively set out a way to implement the action items. Unless we make them a part of normal running. Integrate the learning by taking action, not just by recording actions.
How do you make sure that you tune and adjust?
