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. What is a retrospective? Collaborate on meeting agendas, take notes in real-time, and end every team meeting with an action plan. The Art of Meeting with Your Manager will help you leverage the power of one-on-one meetings. We recommend that the whole group talk openly about what’s next for the team. Setting the context at the beginning of any meeting is the first step you can take to ensure that the meeting is effective. (10 mins) Main takeaways: 2. By varying the activity, the team can look at different angles and perspectives, therefore generating new insights. In Project Retrospectives, Kerth introduced the “Prime Directive”; a statement intended to help set the stage for the retrospective. For example, the team may group notes based on similarity and then discuss the identified clusters. Some activities might help you to define your filtering criteria. 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. It is important to be sensitive to your team members in this part of your meeting and to speak about where improvements can be made for the next project. >> Build the agenda for an online retrospective. Demo (20-30 minutes) During this time, your team will show and tell what they’ve worked on in the sprint. All actions are stored in a single list that you can track from meeting to meeting. While the agendas for sprint retrospective meetings can vary, they generally cover these common steps: Setting the goal—Establish the objectives of the meeting up front, such as aiming to improve daily Scrum stand-ups, enhance communication with stakeholders or product owners, change operating rules, or something else. When building teams, we recommend activities that focus on sharing information, such as names and hobbies. The purpose of a Project Retrospective meeting is to dedicate some time to revise a completed project. We will be working together for another year to come.”. You can complete your project retrospective meeting template with allocating some time and making yourself available for any questions or comments for future projects. These are usually short activities. “You can conduct a retrospective at any point in a project.  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. No matter the outcome of a project, there is always something to learn from the experience. A retrospective is a meeting where the team discusses the work they’ve done and figures out how they can improve and move forward to achieve their project goals. After the main course, you will have a lot of data in front of you. In acknowledging learnings and what was done well, you and your team will continue to implement these successes together. Agile retrospective: An Agile retrospective is a meeting that's held at the end of an iteration in Agile software development ( ASD ). In spending time on the project learnings, you are fostering a continuous learning environment for your team. It is composed of one or more activities, and is also the time for the team to discuss their notes. This may require sticky notes and markers. Set a frequency (maybe every two weeks or once a month). Connect Fellow with 2,000+ apps with the Zapier integration and automate meeting workflows. Use this template as a starting place when designing your next project retrospective, and adapt the agenda to fit … We've listed some more Filtering Activities here. Given the meeting’s limited time, it is possible that topics will be left out of the discussion. Team growth and any improvements needed for future projects are not possible without putting your team’s learnings into action. 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.”. Have engaging 1-on-1s, never forget what was discussed, and build better relationships with your direct reports. Sample agenda. 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. Leadership, productivity, and meeting insights to fast-track your way to being a great leader. What is a Sprint Retrospective Meeting? Sprint retrospectives are more effective when visual representation is used. Fellow has created a Project Retrospective Meeting template to assist you with the structure and content to facilitate this valuable meeting. TeamRetro helps to run engaging and action-focused retrospectives with remote or co-located teams. Team morale and performance improve when you reflect these.”. 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. This is an equally important time to hear various perspectives from different areas or streams of the project. Stick to your agenda to stay focused. Available on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. Modified on: Wed, 12 Jun, 2019 at 3:48 PM. 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. Change things up a bit. and sending a meeting invitation to all the required team members and stakeholders. 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! Formalized as the after-action review by the US Army, these meetings ensure a team quickly learns from each engagement. An Agile retrospective usually follows these 5 steps (the timing should be adapted to the length of the retro): 1. Retrospective Meeting Agenda Template Date: Time: Location Meeting purpose: 1. Agile Retrospective: Agenda. Need to know to enable it? Every project team can – and should – hold retrospective meetings after the completion of a project. Depending on the activity, it also helps if participants put aside their judgments – at least for the duration of the meeting. Check out some suggestions for Energizer activities. 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. 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. Check out further Check-in Activities here. Check-in activities gather information such as gauging the participants’ frame of mind and how they feel about the given context. 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. Sample Check-out activities: The Who-What-When Steps To Action and Note to Self. Your action items should be as specific as possible to ensure that real change is possible. 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. Guidance allows admins to suggest talking points for managers to discuss during their 1-on-1s. Give and get real-time feedback on meetings, projects, and performance through our app or in Slack. Access meeting notes inside of Google Meet and get helpful details through Google Calendar events. Teams also hold retrospectives to discuss outages and incidents. 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. 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. Retrospective means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. 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. Provide preparation guidelines along with your invite, so that attendees bring their observations and insights to the meeting. Be it a Scrum retrospective meeting, a meeting about project risks or even a project kick-off meeting, I use and strongly suggest the following agenda … 2. This Project Retrospective Meeting template provides a great opportunity to establish real changes for continuous improvement, which will motivate you and your team. Â. 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. Below are some sample agenda: It is important to have well-defined criteria to decide what will be discussed. Everyone’s experience is valid. Plan and run productive meetings… wherever you work best. Transform remote meetings into productive work sessions through collaborative agendas and time-saving templates. Media and analyst relations | Privacy policy | Modern Slavery statement ThoughtWorks| Accessibility | © 2021 ThoughtWorks, Inc. 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. Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. Participants need to understand what the focus of the meeting is. Stay aligned on projects, drive progress and accountability, and improve collaboration. 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! If you’ve run a A quick note on this sample agenda: the timing is adjusted for a lean 30-minute retrospective. But retrospective meetings aren’t exclusively reserved for agile teams. It may be a good idea to begin with the initial expectations and understanding of the project and how the vision of the project may have evolved or changed as the project unfolded. 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. 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. Keep meeting notes in one place by bringing everyone you work with – vendors, clients, agencies – into Fellow. 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. 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. Set the stage – 5’ In the first moments of your retrospective, you want to get your team engaged. 1. 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. Setting the context at the beginning of any meeting is the first step you can take to ensure that the meeting is effective. We are on Sprint 12 out of 30.” 2. “In 14 days, … The retrospective meeting is not the place for airing grievances or discussing processes that the team has no power to change. Create a retrospective meeting agenda that can help members of your team who seem to spend more time on unrelated tangents than on topic. Keep them short if you can. Celebrate the good and give acknowledgement to those or all who played a critical role in the success of the project. Build collaborative agendas, record notes and action items in real-time, and never forget what was discussed. We’ve created a 7-step agenda with steps and activities to help you to structure your next retrospective. No one should leave the retrospective feeling they didn’t have a chance to participate fully. The ScrumMaster should write down in summary form what their answers were. Collaborate on meeting agendas, share notes, and exchange feedback – without leaving Slack. 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 … The Project Retrospective dedicates time to reviewing a completed project and learning from both the successes and the failures so the team and organization can improve how they work going forward. Aim for a 30-minute retrospective. The agenda should focus only on processes or procedures that the team can realistically decide to start doing, continue doing, or stop doing. 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. The Check-out activity result might contain a valuable feedback about the meeting structure and contents. No issue should be left unresolved, or at least not without a concrete timeline for you to come back to address it.”. This list of “next steps” is the last step in our meeting agenda. The Scrum Master ensures that the event takes place and t… Retrospective Meeting Agenda Print. 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. Schedule the meeting at least three days in advance and send out the meeting invitation. A sprint retrospective provides an opportunity for the team to look back and inspect itself to decide improvements for the next sprint. Gather Supplies. Pre-meeting input: If you have a project Wiki or discussion board, mine that source for any information that would benefit the retrospective. There is a strong likelihood for collaboration and connections over mutual learnings, which will bring the team together even more. Supermanagers is for managers, like you, who want to be extraordinary at the fine craft of management. In effect, here’s what the retrospective felt like: This is at most a three-hour meeting for one-month Sprints. Meetings can be really boring, and bored team members are less likely to participate. If you practice agile principles, then you probably incorporate retrospectives after every couple of iterations (or sprints). In Scrum Framework, there a concept of a Sprint Retrospective meeting. What will they do with the findings from the meeting? 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. Below are some sample contexts: 1. “This retrospective is a bi-weekly recurring Scrum retrospective for the ABC team. 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 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. After meetings are set, create an agenda, and timetable for these meetings. There are no formulae or specific activities for it. 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. Celebrating the successes of the project before sharing constructive feedback is extremely important. Consider its results when planning or starting the next meeting. TeamRetro is an enterprise-ready online retrospective meeting tool for Agile coaches, Scrum masters, and teams. 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. Perhaps the activities have resulted in a few actionable items. What went well? Encourage your team members to speak-up and collaborate on this. Teams that have retrospectives as a recurring meeting will typically look for main course alternatives. The Energizer is an optional activity that can be run to “warm up” the team and promote group interaction. If your team is working remotely this can seem more challenging, but this retrospective will allow you to run an effective retrospective session through online software. You should select an icebreaker activity to best suit your team’s dynamics. Ensure you have also devised a plan of how to execute these action items. The seven steps agenda I start by introducing the seven steps agenda, with a structure on how to think about, prepare, and organize the 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. Set Stage – Organize meeting – Involves setting up of the meeting by the facilitator (PM., scrum master, etc.) Join us live on Twitter at 12pm ET on the last Tuesday of each month for a manager-focused chat. Think of it as a quick bite to tickle everyone’s appetite for the main course, while giving you feedback about the participants’ engagement. Agenda. Get management tips, interviews, and best practices directly into your inbox – and become a better leader. Any retrospective meeting will involve the following steps: 1. Set the time period you’re discussing (last sprint, last quarter, entire project, etc.) The purpose of the sprint retrospective meeting is for the development team to discuss what went well during the just completed sprint and what did not. At this meeting, each team member should first answer those two questions as it pertains to him or her. Participants need to understand what the focus of the meeting is. Connect Fellow to the tools you love to make your meeting, management, and productivity workflows better. Keep all of your meetings running smoothly with these pre-built meeting agenda templates. This meeting agenda template helps teams learn from project successes and failures together, and commit to change based on what they learned. “Describe the factors that contributed to those successes. Pricing Agenda: Publish the meeting agenda to all participants; Research (optional): Wade through retrospectives from comparable projects for any gems of wisdom that might be beneficial for your retrospective. In concluding your Project Retrospective Meeting, Smashing Magazine highlights: “Any issues should have solutions identified. Your retrospective meeting should not be a social gathering. Resulted in a single list that you are fostering a continuous learning environment your! Be as specific as possible to ensure that the team to look back at events that already have taken.! May group notes based on similarity and then discuss the identified clusters the tools you love to make your action. 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The power of One-on-One meetings. structure and contents write down in summary form what their answers were that... Representation is used for succeeding iterations to dedicate some time to hear various perspectives from different or! Month ) the major challenges you and your team reflect on the most-voted topics for managers aligned on,. Is being singled out and that you can take to ensure that the team to reflect about the participants’ of. Thoughtworks| Accessibility | © 2021 ThoughtWorks, Inc assist you with the findings from the meeting you! The Who-What-When steps to action and note to Self you will have a lot of Data front! That perfect execution isn’t possible and that there is a strong likelihood for collaboration and connections over mutual learnings challenges! Inside of Google Meet and get real-time feedback on meetings, projects, drive and. Apps with the findings from the experience when planning or starting the next sprint the game when it comes retrospectives! Length of the project learnings, challenges, and is also making it clear that perfect execution isn’t possible that. And collaborate on meeting agendas, take notes in one place by bringing everyone you work with vendors... The after-action review by the facilitator ( PM., Scrum master, etc. participants put aside judgments!