This document provides guidance for how to run distributed retrospectives. This guide can be reviewed by the whole team but is most important for the facilitator. The facilitator should be chosen by the team and does not have to be the producer.
The goal of the retrospective is to understand what we learned and what we have yet to learn about making the project. This improves the team’s operation. One way particular way this happens is by changing the methodology.
Set up a Trello board for the retrospective and ensure that the whole team has access to it. The board should have three columns: “What worked well,” “What can be improved,” “Appreciations,” and “Action Items”.
Make sure everyone can connect to the same videoconferencing solution such as Zoom.
Prepare an ordering of team members that will be used for an early step in the retrospective.
Prime Directive: Read aloud the Retrospective Prime Directive, which is taken from Norm Kerth’s Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review.
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Check-in: Let everyone know the order in which they will be invited to speak. In that order, each person briefly shares how they think the sprint went. This is best done with video enabled and using gallery view, so that you can see the faces of your teams.
Note that this is not time for consensus-building: it is fine to quietly disagree. You may ask clarifying questions. A good way to approach this is to try to restate what you heard in your own words, so that you can tell if you’re on the same page.
Individual Reflections: Set a timer for 8 minutes. During this time, team members mute their audio and write their responses to the first three columns on Trello. Don’t copy anything to the shared board yet: just write them individually.
Remember that the fourth column is only used later in the meeting. Do not add anything to it yet.
Gather Responses: Once the timer goes off, team members copy their responses to cards on Trello.
Read Appreciations: Go through the appreciations column and let the person who shared each item read it aloud.
Group Responses: Walk the team through the process of removing duplicates in the first two columns. This also provides an opportunity for team members to clarify what has been written on the cards.
Vote for discussion topics: Team members vote on which items to discuss in more detail. Invite team members to add themselves to cards in order to show their votes. There is no minimum or maximum number of votes.
Discuss: Choose the top few (2–3) items based on votes and open the floor for discussion. When there is an action item, ask for a champion. If there is consensus and a champion, then document both on the fourth column of Trello.
Close: Conclude the meeting with a quick meta-retrospective. Ask the team about the retrospective itself: what was good, what was bad, what would they change. Be sure to write these down for inclusion in the retrospective report. Thank the participants.
Reasonably soon after the meeting, the facilitator writes a retrospective report. This report provides the team with a record of the meeting. As such, it must include a copy of the Trello board along with a summary of major themes and findings. Circulating the report among the team ensures that this section represents the opinions of the team and not just the perspective of the facilitator. The report must also clearly present any changes to the methodology that were approved by the team during the discussion.
This guide was inspired by Yassal Sundman’s post on the Crisp blog and Martin Fowler’s recommendations on effective video calls.