The Therapy Technique"Retrospective"​

The team's retrospective has proven to be a useful tool for scrum teams to inspect how their last sprint went with discussions on ways of improving. Boredom could be the feeling when the team see the same technique is applied repeatedly, thus the need for creativity is essential to spice things up.

 I created a retrospective technique using body massage as the theme (yaaaaay) which I am excited to share with you.

How did this technique strike my mind? Did it just whiz in like it was magic? No, it didn’t! I would save you the details and hit the dart straight into the bull’s eye. I have been in a lot of body pain lately due to the long journey to work and bad bed I sleep on. Procrastination has always been the norm whenever I tell myself I needed a session with a massage therapist. I decided to book an appointment for three days after because the pain has worsened.

That is what could happen to an agile team that fails to retrospect and take actions to deal with their pain points, it gets worse.

I thought this can be a good technique of retrospective to introduce to the team. I drafted my idea down, invited a colleague, Moses Mugwambi to review my technique before I share it with the team (as this is a good practice to get continuous feedback and acquire more knowledge). He was pleased with the technique and shared some tips to make it more understandable to participants. After this, I asked four team members in my two scrum teams to review my technique based on clarity, value derivation and fun. The feedback was amazing!

The retro style uses "massage session" technique categorized into three parts; pain point (highlights things that hurts or did not work for the team), therapy room (helps us ask why we have this problem and establish the root cause - The 5 why question may come in handy here) and masseuse (identify the solution and discuss at least an action plan to execute this).

Technique

The first phase (pain point) would help the team share their individual “didn’t go well” opinions in the first column. This may be time-boxed to 10 minutes. Grouping these opinions into similar sub-groups could be helpful to reduce repetition on related items. Dot voting is an exercise that can come handy also to help the team identify collectively top priority grouped item to discuss. An opinion sub-group picked would have to go through the three stages before we can move to next high voted sub-group.

The second phase (therapy room) would create an opportunity for the team members to discuss the pain point. Problem-solving techniques such as “5 Why’s”, “Who, What & When” etc. can be useful to help the team identify the root cause problem for this pain point. The aim of this phase is not to find the solution but to identify the root cause.

The third phase (Masseuse) helps the team identify the solution and agree on the set of action plans to actualize this. 

It is essential to explain to your team the value we aim to derive from this technique. Whilst I was running the session, I got a question "is the diagnosis aka therapy room where we talk about what went well?". I smiled and further explained, no it isn't, this is where we discuss in detail why we have the pain point to identify the root cause.

This technique helped us remain focused and concise to finish before the time box. The team loved it!

What is the name of this technique? You may ask! “em, well I haven’t thought of a name yet”. Well since we need a name, I can call this “The Therapy Technique” or "Triple T".

Thank you and I hope you enjoyed the article and feel free to share the outcome of your experience with your team trying this technique.