I have organized annual team results overview and targets grooming differently this time. Inspired by Joakim’s follow-up after Running big retrospectives at Spotify I started preparing for retrospectives after 2012 for each of my teams. In my case retrospectives where big not in terms of attendees, but in terms of scope: we had to discuss team’s results after a whole year and then to define a vision and targets for 2013.
I think it’s a must to start every new year with a plan what you want to achieve and have main directions you are going to focus on. It helps a lot when you are considering several options, in such case you should always stick to those that lead to yours targets.
Preparation
I believe it’s a good idea to change environment for team events from time to time, so I booked a cozy conference room with coffee breaks and lunch in a conference center (on different day for every team). Then started creating an agenda for the day. I came up with such plan:
- Opening
- Retrospectives of 2012
- Overview of company targets for 2013
- Team’s projection of company targets
- Team’s product’s roadmap overview
- Discuss and define technical roadmap
- Closing
I highly recommend to read Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great book, it has lots of practical advices on how to conduct retrospectives. I took a couple of games/exercises from it to give some dynamics for the event, to fill-in short breaks and involve everyone.
Opening
I started the event with a short welcoming story, answered the questions why we gathered here and what was our main goal and what was the agenda for this meeting. After that I asked guys to empty their minds by writing down things that they concerned about on the cards and put into pockets for tomorrow [1]. Then we agreed on ground rules for the day [1]:
- Do not leave the room if you haven’t said what you wanted to.
- Stop the discussion if you are bored.
- No trolling (do not talk in sake of talking or even trying to offence others, do not continue the discussion that will not have the result).
Retrospectives
And we moved on to Retrospectives part. For this I prepared in advanced: made short presentation of team’s journey through 2012. Starting with our targets for the year, I’ve put a couple of events on a timeline and ended with overview of what was achieved [2].
With the team we went through this presentation, stopping to shortly discuss each event and remembering what was happening else and how we felt about it. This is a very good exercise for the team to analyze situations they went through, their behavior and results they achieved.
I’ve ended these retrospectives by gathering the feedback from the team by asking how do they felt while remembering last year. They could choose Sad, Mad, Glad or Afraid [2]. These are root emotions one can express his each and every feeling.
Grooming
After the lunch we started Grooming part. In the beginning I brought back our development directions for this years. And we started discussing how those direction may be applied to our team. By the end of directions we were having a decent list (on the whiteboard) of things we can do to help our company to reach 2013 goals. Then we voted each having 2 votes and summarized the results. That led us to prioritized list of technical features we need to implement - that was our technical roadmap.
Then Product Owner presented product roadmap from business perspective. We discussed it a bit and tried to combine these two roadmaps into one team’s roadmap - that actually was the ultimate goal of this event.
Closing
Before making a summary of the day I ask everyone who attended to take 5 minutes and write down personal take-aways. Then everyone had a chance to share what he liked about the event, what are his take-aways and what to his opinion should had been done differently and why.
And the final activity we had - gather feedback about the event. I’ve used Vacationer, Explorer, Shopper, Prisoner survey [2] this time. The results were very good - there were two dominant responses: Shopper in the first place, and Explorer in the second.
Tracking
I shared this idea of organizing annual overview offsite with my colleagues other program developers and they run similar events. After all teams had their targets grooming we gathered all together and representatives from each team shared what they are going to achieve.
In addition to that I’ve scheduled recurrent meeting every 3 months with teams to track how are we moving towards our goals.
Summary
Overall I am happy with this event. Next time I’ll try to involve more people in preparation phase and be more strict on side discussions that do not lead directly to the goal. And I am definitely having such a grooming in the beginning of the next year.
Literature
[1] Running big retrospectives at Spotify, Joakim Sunden
[2] Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen