This meeting agenda template helps teams learn from project successes and failures together, and commit to change based on what they learned. Aim for a 30-minute retrospective. What is the Retrospective Meeting? TeamRetro helps to run engaging and action-focused retrospectives with remote or co-located teams. All actions are stored in a single list that you can track from meeting to meeting. This can be done via various agile retrospective activities like Start, Stop, and Continue, Paint Me picture etc. A quick note on this sample agenda: the timing is adjusted for a lean 30-minute retrospective. In Project Retrospectives, Kerth introduced the “Prime Directive”; a statement intended to help set the stage for the retrospective. There are no formulae or specific activities for it. Retrospective Meeting Agenda Print. Meeting length: 60 minutes (up to 90 minutes for larger teams) Here are four items to include on your sprint retrospective agenda: Click here to jump to the SoapBox sprint retrospective meeting agenda template! No issue should be left unresolved, or at least not without a concrete timeline for you to come back to address it.”. When building teams, we recommend activities that focus on sharing information, such as names and hobbies. Icebreakers can also be used before any meeting, to invigorate the participants and make them feel more engaged. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter. Change things up a bit. This Project Retrospective Meeting template provides a great opportunity to establish real changes for continuous improvement, which will motivate you and your team. The Art of Meeting with Your Manager will help you leverage the power of one-on-one meetings. If you’ve run a This kind of activity helps to create a friendly environment and makes people more comfortable to participate in the activities that will follow. Depending on the activity, it also helps if participants put aside their judgments – at least for the duration of the meeting. The main course is the core of a meeting that seeks to foster continuous improvement. This is at most a three-hour meeting for one-month Sprints. The ScrumMaster should write down in summary form what their answers were. Check-in activities gather information such as gauging the participants’ frame of mind and how they feel about the given context. Set the time period you’re discussing (last sprint, last quarter, entire project, etc.) Agenda. It is important to have well-defined criteria to decide what will be discussed. Whether you’re new to the software development game or been a player for years, chances are you’ve participated in a sprint retrospective.If done well, these agile meetings can highlight opportunities for change, generate meaningful process improvements, and ultimately move the team in the right direction.If done poorly, a sprint retrospective can turn into a blame game or give some of … Agile Retrospective: Agenda. Participants need to understand what the focus of the meeting is. Asking your teammates to share positive feedback with each other is a way to add value to this section of your project retrospective meeting agenda. Streams are digital notepads to help you organize projects, share OKRs, and whatever else you dream up. Retrospective means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. The Energizer is an optional activity that can be run to “warm up” the team and promote group interaction. This meeting note template lets you tap into the profound potential of these sessions by forming a blueprint for better teamwork through three main components: Adaptability: Agile product teams made retrospective meetings popular, but anyone can benefit from them. In this section of your project retrospective meeting template, discuss the project challenges that were not under control of the project team, that affected the project negatively. Check out further Check-in Activities here. Facilitate an open discussion in this final section of your project retrospective meeting agenda and ensure that your group feels as if they have all of the insight, tools and resources necessary to successfully execute the action items created. Focus on improvement, rather than placing blame. Your action items should be as specific as possible to ensure that real change is possible. Participants need to understand what the focus of the meeting is. Schedule the meeting at least three days in advance and send out the meeting invitation. Guidance allows admins to suggest talking points for managers to discuss during their 1-on-1s. The team had a great discussion and generated many insights. Below are some sample agenda: Asking your teammates to share positive feedback with each other is a way to add value to this section of your project retrospective meeting agenda. You can start the meeting either with a pre-defined context, or you can define it real-time with the participants (“So, what is the context for this retrospective?”). Formalized as the after-action review by the US Army, these meetings ensure a team quickly learns from each engagement. Your retrospective meeting should not be a social gathering. Perhaps the activities have resulted in a few actionable items. TeamRetro is an enterprise-ready online retrospective meeting tool for Agile coaches, Scrum masters, and teams. Connect Fellow to the tools you love to make your meeting, management, and productivity workflows better. For example, the team may group notes based on similarity and then discuss the identified clusters. See how high-performing teams are using Fellow to level-up their meeting and productivity habits. A retrospective is a meeting that happens at the end of the project or at the end of each scrum sprint. Set a frequency (maybe every two weeks or once a month). There is a strong likelihood for collaboration and connections over mutual learnings, which will bring the team together even more. In spending time on the project learnings, you are fostering a continuous learning environment for your team. The purpose of a Project Retrospective meeting is to dedicate some time to revise a completed project. Retrospective Meeting Agenda Template Date: Time: Location Meeting purpose: 1. Use this template as a starting place when designing your next project retrospective, and adapt the agenda to fit … Any retrospective meeting will involve the following steps: 1. Ensure you have also devised a plan of how to execute these action items. Stick to your agenda to stay focused. In acknowledging learnings and what was done well, you and your team will continue to implement these successes together. Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. Encourage your team members to speak-up and collaborate on this. In concluding your Project Retrospective Meeting, Smashing Magazine highlights: “Any issues should have solutions identified. While creating these action items, be sure that these changes are realistic, feasible and are clear.  We are on Sprint 12 out of 30.”, “In 14 days, our artifact should reach the main production stage.”, “Feature XYZ exploded in production, bringing the servers down for 2 hours until sys-admin could bring the older version back up.”, “This team will work together in a new project starting today.”, “We have worked together in the past year. Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Check out further resources for your Agile project management, tracking and planning needs, “This retrospective is a bi-weekly recurring Scrum retrospective for the ABC team. It is composed of one or more activities, and is also the time for the team to discuss their notes. An Agile retrospective usually follows these 5 steps (the timing should be adapted to the length of the retro): 1. Agile retrospective: An Agile retrospective is a meeting that's held at the end of an iteration in Agile software development ( ASD ). Although there are many ways to conduct an agile sprint retrospective, our recommendation is to conduct it as a start-stop-continue meeting. After meetings are set, create an agenda, and timetable for these meetings. In Scrum Framework, there a concept of a Sprint Retrospective meeting. A lot of time and hard work went into this project, which needs to be recognized by giving thanks to everyone who made the execution possible. However, everyone would benefit from a postmortem, or post-project retrospective, regardless of your specific design and development methodology.”. It is not the ScrumMaster’s role to provide answers to things that did not go well, but rather to help t… Transform remote meetings into productive work sessions through collaborative agendas and time-saving templates. This list of “next steps” is the last step in our meeting agenda. Sprint retrospectives are more effective when visual representation is used. Set Stage – Organize meeting – Involves setting up of the meeting by the facilitator (PM., scrum master, etc.) This may require sticky notes and markers. Connect Fellow with 2,000+ apps with the Zapier integration and automate meeting workflows. Next, talk about any project shortcomings that were caused due to tasks or decisions that were carried out poorly. Teams also hold retrospectives to discuss outages and incidents. “You can conduct a retrospective at any point in a project. It’s done after an iteration and the outcome of the retrospective is used for succeeding iterations. A few examples are to include new items to the team’s backlog of work, email the meeting notes to the team, schedule (or remind everyone about) the next meeting. At this meeting, each team member should first answer those two questions as it pertains to him or her. Sample Check-out activities: The Who-What-When Steps To Action and Note to Self. You and your team should feel as if you’ve put all of your thoughts and insights on the table and that your ideas and opinions have been heard. Smashing Magazine furthers this point by articulating, “You are prioritizing growth and learning over pushing out a product and moving on to the next challenge. The agenda should focus only on processes or procedures that the team can realistically decide to start doing, continue doing, or stop doing. What is a retrospective? Setting the context at the beginning of any meeting is the first step you can take to ensure that the meeting is effective. Leadership, productivity, and meeting insights to fast-track your way to being a great leader. Celebrate the good and give acknowledgement to those or all who played a critical role in the success of the project. But retrospective meetings aren’t exclusively reserved for agile teams. The retrospective meeting is not the place for airing grievances or discussing processes that the team has no power to change. Once a project or workshop has taken place, it’s important for a team to look back and review key learnings, create an action plan and to identify areas for improvement in the future. The Learnings component of your Project Retrospective Meeting Template is a great opportunity for your team members to share something that they have learned while completing this project. The Check-out activity result might contain a valuable feedback about the meeting structure and contents. In this retrospective meeting agenda, see how your group might effectively reflect on a completed project and bring up any essential learning points in less than an hour! Encouraging project retrospective questions such as, “what should we continue doing?” or “what should we do again for future projects?” will harness a productive conversation with your group. We recommend that the whole group talk openly about what’s next for the team. We are on Sprint 12 out of 30.” 2. “In 14 days, … Given the meeting’s limited time, it is possible that topics will be left out of the discussion. In effect, here’s what the retrospective felt like: Sprint Retrospective Meeting Agenda The agenda of the sprint retrospective should address what went well during the sprint and what went wrong. Continuous improvement is the name of the game when it comes to retrospectives. It is a good meeting starter for any team meeting, and is especially valuable for early stages of team building. Then one of the engineers (already late for another meeting) finally summed up the meeting: “Ok, let’s try not to submit all of the code on the last day of the sprint.” There was no opportunity to amplify the good, as the good was not discussed. Stay aligned on projects, drive progress and accountability, and improve collaboration. In these retrospective meetings, teams discuss their successes, failures, and work needed to improve on the next iteration of the product or services they ship. By varying the activity, the team can look at different angles and perspectives, therefore generating new insights. Some activities might help you to define your filtering criteria. You should select an icebreaker activity to best suit your team’s dynamics. >> Build the agenda for an online retrospective. In this section of your Project Retrospective Meeting Agenda, it is valuable to share factual information about the projects execution and outcome in a completely objective manner. A retrospective meeting is where you and your team will discuss and learn from such projects with a view to improve things next time around. A sprint retrospective provides an opportunity for the team to look back and inspect itself to decide improvements for the next sprint. Instead of just describing the successes the project has had, it’s more valuable to state the factors that contribute to these successes so that similar projects can repeat the successes.”. We will discuss the key benefits of creating a sprint retrospective agenda in detail and provide some tips to help you make the meeting as effective as possible. Visualize and prioritize your meeting action items, delegate tasks, and automate the follow-up. We’ve created a 7-step agenda with steps and activities to help you to structure your next retrospective. Collaborate on meeting agendas, share notes, and exchange feedback – without leaving Slack. Seeing as it will always be valuable to conduct project retrospective meetings, it is a great idea moving forwards for your team members to keep logs or make notes to keep track of learnings, what is going well, and what could use some improvement as the project evolves. Available on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. After the main course, you will have a lot of data in front of you. Discuss these factors and ensure to take note of the major challenges you and your team faced. Gather Supplies. It is important to begin your Project Retrospective meeting with a high- scale overview of the project timeline, the budget used and any major events that took place. If this is not the first sprint, the retrospective may begin with a discussion of the opportunities for improvement identified in the last retrospective, along with a discussion of whether or not those improvements were implemented successfully. No one should leave the retrospective feeling they didn’t have a chance to participate fully. The Art of the One-on-One Meeting is the definitive guide to the most powerful tool for managers. Have engaging 1-on-1s, never forget what was discussed, and build better relationships with your direct reports. Team morale and performance improve when you reflect these.”. 3. Pre-meeting input: If you have a project Wiki or discussion board, mine that source for any information that would benefit the retrospective. What will they do with the findings from the meeting? Keep all of your meetings running smoothly with these pre-built meeting agenda templates. Setting the context at the beginning of any meeting is the first step you can take to ensure that the meeting is effective. The main course activities are used to gather data, check on the team’s morale, talk about the positive stuff, recognize people, and seek improvements. In their definitive book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen came up with a five-stage framework for retrospective meetings, which I’ve adapted below to include a few exercises I find work well. As described in the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.The Sprint Retrospective occurs after the Sprint Review and prior to the next Sprint Planning. 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Fellow has created a Project Retrospective Meeting template to assist you with the structure and content to facilitate this valuable meeting. Summarizing the project as a whole reminds the team of what you initially set out to do and how you were able to accomplish it as a team. Access meeting notes inside of Google Meet and get helpful details through Google Calendar events. Need to know to enable it? It is also making it clear that perfect execution isn’t possible and that there is always room for growth and improvement. Seeing change in future projects will be the ultimate measure of your project retrospective meetings’ success. They drive the team to reflect about the given context, reinforce a shared vision and generate insights. Everyone’s experience is valid. “Describe the factors that contributed to those successes. Keep them short if you can. The purpose of this meeting is to improve the quality and the way in which future projects are completed, essentially making the execution less complex as the team learns how to avoid any shortcomings and challenges. Check out some suggestions for Energizer activities. Below are some sample contexts: 1. “This retrospective is a bi-weekly recurring Scrum retrospective for the ABC team. On the final call of the Squads program, each member shares what they've learned over the last 12 weeks and shares what they plan to do next in their career. The meeting is almost over. Pricing (10 mins) Main takeaways: 2. What went well? Help your team reflect on the learnings, challenges, and outcomes of a completed project. Modified on: Wed, 12 Jun, 2019 at 3:48 PM. Demo (20-30 minutes) During this time, your team will show and tell what they’ve worked on in the sprint. This retrospection allows you and your team to learn from successes, short-comings and to innovate an approach to move forward and seek improvement for future projects. We will be working together for another year to come.”. These are usually short activities. The Prime Directive states: ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’ The statement is invaluable to set the tone for the meeting. Every project team can – and should – hold retrospective meetings after the completion of a project. Save time with a pre-built template complete with recommended talking points to get you started, In Fellow, customize headers, talking points, and more before using it in your next meeting, Use the template in real-time with your meeting attendees to collaborate on meeting notes. Sample agenda. 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