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Strengthen Your Team Relationships and Take Your Team to the Next Level

Introduction

In our day-to-day, and mainly, in the positions of full remote work, the dedicated time to achieve our tasks and objectives is covered with squalls of meetings (clients, troubleshooting, at a company or team level, dependencies with other people, etc.), and we forget some important factors such as:

  • Communication and relationship: Of every monthly and weekly meeting; What percentage do I dedicate to strengthening my relationship with the team to get to know them better and know how they are doing, what motivates them, what concerns them, their hobbies, etc?
  •  Target: What is the purpose of the meeting? Personal to connect and build relationships with my colleagues or for work purposes? I have a 30-minute meeting to agree on estimates and 15 minutes have been for off-topic discussions.
  • Time value: Is the meeting necessary or can the goal of collaborating asynchronously be met? I attended the meeting but, did I have something to contribute or did I learn something that will help me in the future?

In this article, we will focus on the communication side, in which, besides strengthening, we will get feedback that will allow us to improve personally and as a team to also offer a better service and a better quality.

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7 Formats for Great Team Retrospectives

A team retrospective is a meeting at the end of a sprint, project, or milestone where the team reflects on the past work cycle and identifies improvements. It involves celebrating achievements to raise the team spirit, gathering feedback on challenges, and planning how to execute better in upcoming sprints or projects. Retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement and team growth.

Retrospective meetings are structured to facilitate team discussions and beneficial outcomes. They usually start with an introduction, then input from each team member is gathered, presented, and discussed, and finally, the next steps are determined. Gathering input usually happens in parallel. Guided by the questions of a retrospective format, each team member writes up their thoughts on sticky notes and puts them on a whiteboard (or the digital equivalent in remote meetings).

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Skipping Retrospectives?

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. One area where Scrum’s nature of being intentionally incomplete causes issues regularly is whether Scrum teams shall stick to the event schedule even if the team’s life is uneventful? For example, is skipping Retrospectives okay?

Join me and delve into the consequences of skipping Retrospectives in less than 90 seconds.

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***Remote Agile (Part 5): Retrospectives with Distributed Teams

TL; DR: A Remote Retrospective with a Distributed Team

We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools, followed by exploring virtual Liberating Structures, how to master Zoom as well as common remote agile anti-patterns. This fifth article now dives into organizing a remote Retrospective with a distributed team: practices, tools, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Guide on the Sprint Retrospective

According to the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Retrospective serves the following purpose:

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Three-Hundred Articles In The Zone

In November 2015, I had a conversation with a guy named Allen Coin (@Allen_Coin), which turned into a major milestone in my career as an Information Technology professional. Allen was the first to give me an empty and broad canvas to express my thoughts and opinions to an amazing audience of technology enthusiasts and professionals. On November 10, 2015, my first article "Into the Development Time Machine" was published on DZone.com.

At the time, I thought my article did quite well, reaching nearly 3,000 page views. It was far more than I had ever generated in my blog -> johnjvester.wordpress.com

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Living in a World Without Neil Peart

On January 7, 2020, the world of music suffered the loss of an extremely talented musician and lyricist. Neil Peart, the drummer of the progressive rock band named "Rush", died at the age of 67, ending a long battle with brain cancer (glioblastoma).

Suddenly, You Were Gone

Because Neil was private in nature, legions of fans were shocked to hear the news of his death.  I know I was surprised. In fact, a long-time friend (Jeff from "When the Dream Disappears From Your Dream Job") did not initially believe my words when I sent him a text shortly after I saw an article from Rolling Stone magazine.

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The Myth of the Blameless Retrospective

I love the idea of the blameless retrospective. What's not to like? Getting all the members of a team together to blamelessly review work done at the end of a production cycle or in response to a crisis is a great idea. There's a great benefit in having a fearless, uninhibited, blame-free examination of a problem in order to improve. You get more information and you get better ideas. Every company should do it. The problem is that most don't. Why? Because many, if not most, corporations are, by nature, blame-seeking.

Blame-seeking in corporations is nothing new. It's the low-hanging fruit in cause analysis. Identifying a single point of failure or particular human shortcoming is usually a lot easier than doing the complex work required to really understand why a failure occurred. However, this is not to say that placing blame and taking actions based on that blame assignment is an ineffective way to address an issue. Sometimes it's justified.

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Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop

Why running a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum. Beyond the basics, we have addressed the Sprint Retrospective, the Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog, as well as the Daily Scrum.

While the initial meetups went smoothly, the last two meetups felt rushed given that we usually have about two hours. Also, the changing composition of the meetup attendees has become more challenging: less than 10 percent of the approximately 150 participants so far have attended meetups.

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How to Run a Positive Retrospective (And Avoid a Gripe Session)

It's hard to learn without a positive outlook.

A few times recently, I've been asked about retrospectives -- specifically how to keep them from becoming a gripe session. Here are a few things that I've found effective:

1. Start with the positive 

While we certainly want to talk about and address any issues, I like to talk about the positive things that have occurred during the last period before we delve into things we might want to change. I haven't yet been involved in a retrospective where the list of positive things wasn't long. This helps set the tone for the rest of the retrospective.

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Continuous Improvement Activities Beyond the Retrospective

We could all use a little help improving.
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

This is one of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. While following all the principles is essential to being agile, one might argue that without tuning and adjusting team behavior on a regular basis, productivity gains will be hard to achieve.

Unfortunately, many read the above principle and only associate it with performing team retrospectives at the end of a sprint, or periodically in kanban. But if you seek to build a high-performing team, there are many more improvement activities you should consider adopting.

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What I Learned About IT From Rocking My Son

This adorable child has clearly taken a nap today.

In April, my wife Nicole ended up having shoulder surgery to repair a torn labrum, frozen shoulder, and a nearly detached bicept. As a result of this procedure and recovery, she currently isn't able to rock our son before his naps. Since I work from home a majority of the time, this task has fallen to me each afternoon.

From my experience, toddlers maintain the urge to fight nap time, regardless of their level of fatigue. In fact, the more exhausted they are, the worse the struggle. After some amount of time, though, the resistance gives way to acceptance. He is not in tears or upset, just resisting taking a much needed break from an already long day.

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Webinar #10: Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns [Video]

TL;DR

The tenth Hands-on Agile webinar on sprint retrospective anti-patterns covers twelve anti-patterns of the sprint retrospective—from #NoRetro to the dispensable buffer to UNSMART action items to a missing product owner.

Webinar Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns: The Chapters

Let us start with a short refresher from the Scrum Guide. According to the Scrum Guide:

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Several Years Later: A Case of the Telephone Game

Remember the Telephone Game? 

You can read all about it here, but the gist is the first person is whispered a message. That person then whispers the same message (to the best of their recollection) to another person. The process continues until the last person receives the message. At that point, the last person announces the message for all to hear. The fun part of this game is to hear how much the story changes as the message is passed from person to person.