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Submit ticketYour retrospectives are only as good as the way you facilitate them. A fun and engaging retro will open many doors and keep your team on the way towards continuous improvement. On the other hand, a boring and ill-facilitated meeting won’t result in anything other than wasted time for everyone involved.
Facilitating a great retrospective depends very much on following the best practices and choosing the right tool for the purpose. Before reaching the end of this guide, you will see how easy it is to do so with ScatterSpoke.
Before diving into that, it is important to understand the purpose and scope of a retrospective.
Retrospectives are an incredible opportunity for your team to look back at the work you’ve processed during the last sprint. The goal of doing so is to learn, connect, and grow as a team continuously.
The traditional process for running a retrospective consists of five stages:
With that covered, let’s dive into the process of facilitating a retrospective with ScatterSpoke.
The first thing you need to do to facilitate a retrospective with ScatterSpoke is to log into the platform. If this is your first time doing so, please check out the dedicated guide to getting started with ScatterSpoke.
Once you are logged in, you can set the stage for a new retrospective directly from the team dashboard. All you need to do is click on the purple "Create team retrospective" dropdown and select "Create retrospective".
When you create a new retrospective, you can choose between two types of templates:
Select a template, name your retro and click the Create Retrospective button. If this is your team's first retrospective, you will advance directly to the retrospective board.
If not, you will advance to our pre-retrospective review page where you can review metrics, goals, and action items before starting your retrospective.
You can rename columns by clicking on their names and replacing the text inside. To delete a column, just select the three-dot menu located at the top right corner of it and choose “delete” from the options that pop up.
Adding a new column is even easier - just click on the namesake "Add new column" button to the right of the last named column. To switch the order of the retro board columns, click on the one you wish to move and drag it in the direction you need to.
Before you begin, set the ground rules for the meeting. The Prime Directive is a great place to start:
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."
--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
Start your retro by inviting the team to add their feedback to the board. This is a great place to set a time box and use the timer in the facilitator controls so everyone knows how much time is remaining.
To prevent groupthink from influencing the feedback that you collect, we recommend that you turn on private feedback. This ensures that each member of your retro will only see the cards that they type until you are ready to reveal all the feedback. You can hover over this icon to see the total percentage of participation to help you decide when to expose all the cards.
Once all your cards are visible, invite the team to group similar items together by dragging them together. Cards can be grouped across columns. Give your group a name that summarizes the intent. Any comments or themes associated with individual cards will be combined in the group.
Invite the team to vote for the items they feel need the most attention or further discussion. Setting vote count to define the number of votes each team member can use. You can hover over this icon to see the total percentage of participants who have voted.
Votes will appear in real-time however, we recommend that you turn on private voting to hide the number of votes each topic gets until revealed. This ensures that participant will only see their own votes.
You can sort all cards to filter the topics with the highest number of votes to the top of each column. This will sort the board for all participants as well so they can see the cards in the order that you will discuss them
This is another great time to use the timer to ensure that you have enough time to get through all of the items identified.
Be sure to leave time to identify and capture action items. Great action items are the key to making your retrospectives impactful and should be specific and measurable. Be sure to note an owner and due date for follow-up in your next retro.
Our Guided Retrospective process walks you through the first four phases and makes it easy to complete the fifth, Act, during the discuss phase. Simply, start your retrospective and advance through the phases using the right arrow button on the right end of the retrospective controls at the bottom of the board.
When you get to the Discuss phase you will be guided through the topics generated by your team based on the number of votes each received. The view will focus on topic at a time and gives you easy controls to make an action item from a card and see when participants are ready to move on to the next topic.
We also provide a clear view of the action plan you develop as a team during your discussion. This makes it easy to wrap up by reviewing your plan, assigning action items, and setting due dates.
If you don't want to use our Guided Retrospective process, you can turn it off using the retrospective controls at the bottom of the board. You will then have a new set of controls that allow you to move through the phases in any order.
The unguided retrospective format also displays the entire retrospective board during the Discuss phase. This allows you to move around through the topics however you wish.
To manage action items after each retrospective, just click on the “Action Items Button” in the top menu. It is available from anywhere within the platform. Besides giving you the ability to create new action items, it provides you with the opportunity to see both unresolved and resolved items from past retrospectives.
From the Action items menu, you can change the assignee, due date, and leave comments on each item. Once done, you can resolve an action item straight from there.
ScatterSpoke helps you eliminate waste in your dev process.