Mark Needham

A few weeks ago a slide deck from an Esther Derby presentation on retrospectives was doing the rounds on twitter and one thing that I found interesting in the deck was the suggestion that a retrospective needs to be focused in some way.

I’ve participated in a few focused retrospectives over the past 7/8 months and I think there are some things to be careful about when we decide to focus on something specific rather than just looking back at a time period in general.

Victimisation

In a retrospective about 6 months ago or so we focused on the analysis part of our process as we’d been struggling to know when a story was complete and what exactly its scope was.

The intention wasn’t the victimise the people working in that role but since there were very few of them compared to people in other roles they were forced onto the defensive as people criticised their work.

It was a very awkward retrospective and it felt like a retrospective was probably the wrong place to address the problem.

It might have been better for the analysts to have been given the feedback privately and then perhaps worked on a solution with a smaller group of people.

Looking for a problem when there isn’t one

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about whether with very focused retrospectives we end up looking for something to change rather than having any specific pain point which necessitates change.

The problem with this is that there’s a thin line between following the status quo because it works and getting complacent and not looking for ways to improve.

It is interesting to keep in mind though that if it doesn’t seem like there is something to change in an area then perhaps that’s the wrong thing to be focusing on at the moment, which nicely leads into…

Let the team choose the area of focus

There can be a tendency in the teams I’ve worked on for people in managementy roles to dictate what the focus of the retrospective will be which makes sense in a way since they may be able to see something which the team can’t.

On the other hand it can mean that we end up focusing on the wrong thing and team members probably won’t be that engaged in the retrospective since they don’t really get to dictate what’s talked about.

Esther points this out out on slide 23 of the presentation – “Choose a focus that reflects what’s going on for the team“. This perhaps can be determined by having a vote before hand based on some topics that seem prominent.

In summary

There’s lots of other useful tips in Esther’s slide deck which are worth having a look at and I’m sure most of the potential problems I’ve listed probably don’t happen when we have a highly skilled/experienced facilitator.

Last week my colleague Pat Fornasier ran our team’s fortnightly retrospective and one of the exercises we did was ‘the 5 whys’.

I’ve always wanted to see how the 5 why’s would pan out but could never see how you could fit it into a normal retrospective.

Pat was able to do this by using the data gathered by an earlier timeline exercise where the team had to plot the main events that had happened over the last 6 months.

We ended up with 5 key areas and split into groups to explore those topics further.

Wikipedia describes the 5 whys like so:

The 5 Whys is a questions-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem.

My group had to investigate the topic ‘Why are we so obsessed with points?’.

These were some of my observations from the exercise:

• It’s very easy to lose focus on the exercise and start talking about solutions or ideas when only a couple of whys have been followed.

  Pat suggested that this problem could be solved by having a facilitator who helps keep the discussion on track.

• We went down a dead-end a few times where our 5th why ended up being something quite broad which we couldn’t do anything about.

  We ended up going back up the chain of whys to see whether we could branch off a different way on any of the and it was actually reasonably easy to think of other whys the further up you went.

• By going beyond surface reasons for things you actually end up with much more interesting conversations although I think it does also become a little bit more uncomfortable for people.

  For example we ended up discussing what ‘minimum viable product’ actually means for us and a couple of the group had a much different opinion to the product owner. It would have been interesting if we’d been able to continue the discussion for longer.

• For our particular topic we ended up discussing why the deadline we have was set when it was and couldn’t really come up with any reason for why it couldn’t be changed other than we’d been told it couldn’t.

  It would have been more interesting to have the people external to the team who set the deadline so that we could understand if there was more to it.

I tried looking for a video to see a real life example of a 5 whys discussion being facilitated but I wasn’t able to find one.

Perryn pointed me to a chat log on the cucumber wiki where Aslak asks the 5 whys to someone trying to articulate why they want to have a login feature in their application but I’d be interested in seeing more examples if anyone knows any.