This is a guest post by David Horowitz, CEO of Retrium. He’s going to be running a webinar The Seven Secrets of Highly Effective Retrospectives that will make them more effective for you. It’s on Jan 20th and 11am ET / 2pm PT.
Retrospectives. It’s the part of agile and scrum that so many love to hate.
“We have to run another retrospective? But they never actually do anything useful!”
Or, “Let’s just skip the retrospective this time. There’s too much to do!”
It’s a common refrain. And it’s a huge mistake.
I’m David Horowitz, CEO and co-founder of Retrium. I was invited by the amazing team at Jell to write a guest blog post on the value of retrospectives, and to reveal seven secrets that can make them more effective for you and your team.
At Retrium, we think the retrospective is not only a critical component of any successful agile team. We think the retrospective is the critical component of agile. Here’s why:
Agile without retrospectives
Let’s start with what agile looks like without the retrospective. Imagine yourself at the front door of your house. It’s 7am and you’re groggy. You take a step and oh no! You trip on something and fall onto the hard, cold pavement. What happened?
You pick yourself up and look – turns out there was a rock in your way and you tripped! No matter, you continue on your way.
It’s the next morning. Same story –7am and you’re at the front door of your house ready to head out into the world. You take that same fateful step and not again! There you are, on the pavement, once more.
You couldn’t have made the same mistake, twice, could you? In the real world, it’s unlikely. You probably would have done something about the rock the first time you tripped.
Why don’t we do the same thing in the professional world? Inertia, corporate culture, team dynamics, there are plenty of excuses. But when it comes down to it, that’s all they are – excuses. The retrospective is agile’s built in way of giving you the opportunity to remove whatever barriers you have that are preventing you from fixing your team’s problems.
You tripping on the rock two times in a row? In a nutshell, that’s what agile looks like without the retrospective.
We’ve tried and retros are hard!
We couldn’t agree more. Retrospectives, like everything else worth doing in life, are hard. Really hard.
And that’s why on January 20th at 2pm ET / 11am PT I will be hosting an important webinar: The Seven Secrets of Highly Effective Retrospectives. In it, I’ll be revealing the top seven things you can do to make your retrospectives useful and effective.
And if you’re lucky, maybe something your team will actually look forward to. Every single time.
Here’s just a taste of what I’ll be revealing:
- The best way to ensure your retrospectives lead to real change
- The “pledge” everyone on your team must take before participating
- How to know who to include in each retro
- The single most important thing you can do to keep your team engaged during the retro
- …and much, much more!
It’s going to be fun, interactive, and full of actionable advice that you can immediately take back to level-up your retro skills.
So don’t wait! Reserve your spot.
