Tomorrow's Retrospective Experiment

I stumbled over a videoblog on YouTube over the weekend, Improve your Team Agility in 10 minutes. The main idea on how to improve agility is...(drum roll)... have a retrospective.

One idea that the presenter suggests is this: print out the agile manifesto and the principles of the manifesto. During your retrospective,  talk through them, then give each member of the team 2 red dots and 2 green dots. Get the team to swarm the printout of the principles, adding a green dot for what the team does well and a red for what the team needs to improve. Then analyse the results and see if there are any ideas for improvement.

Some rules that I'll be using are:

• We need to read and think about the principles before the retrospective;
• The green and red dots are to represent what the team does well/badly, not any individual within the team *;
• We should at least try to explain why we chose to dot a particular principle;
• The dotting is done en masse, so nobody is influenced by previous dots;
• We don't have to use all 4 dots.

* I tweeted about this experiment today, and it sounded like it was to root out an individual in the team who wasn't agile enough and do away with him/her, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. The point of the experiment is to improve the team by making the team realise what it needs to do better, not by culling its weakest member!