2020 : Year End Retro Ideas

Inspecting and adapting on a Sprint timescale is a significant challenge for a team, although it is achievable. Inspecting and adapting on a yearly timescale makes my mind boggle at the ambition.

Perhaps the first step is to ask is, what do you really hope to achieve from this end-of-year "Retro"? What exactly is it that is being inspected and adapted, and who is accountable for the outcomes?

When you go at a sustainable pace, it's easy to miss how fast you're moving.

So I have experienced that reflecting on the passage of a whole year can be a way of helping everyone understand the sum of many iterative improvements.

And although I've seen a lot of value in inspecting an entire year, I suggest any planned adaptation for 2021 shouldn't be any more specific than high level objectives, ambitions or a vision.

With some teams in the past, for our last Sprint Retrospective of the year, I judged it was appropriate to take a longer view. Everyone wrote a letter to Santa, explaining why they'd been a good person this year, listing three examples of good things they did/achieved, and asked for up to three things to be different next year.

I let everyone know it's OK to be ambitious, because Santa wants to hear what they really want.

Afterwards, everyone shared their letters, and as a team, we wrote one collective letter, focused very much on team achievements and wishes. It reminded everyone that we were going in the right direction, and helped us focus on where our biggest problems/opportunities were.

If I could go back and change one thing, at the end I would encourage everyone to think of 15% solutions they could apply to achieve the team's biggest wish.

Although it's not exactly what you're looking for, I've had some luck with spending some time reviewing past retrospectives. The organizations that I've worked in slow in December and even the first week or two of January, with people taking vacations for the holidays or to use up earned time off. I take this opportunity to collate notes from the past retrospectives from the year and send them out to everyone and ask that everyone invest a little bit of time (an hour, maximum) looking through things that happened, experiments that were run, action items. Something that I ask people to pay attention to is improvement opportunities that we didn't get to for one reason or another and highlight anything that may be interesting. These present some good things to look at early in the new year, as we start to ramp back up after the holidays, especially if they are lower cost to implement. I also ask people to refresh themselves on some of the problems and pain points so we can all keep an eye out. However, the biggest thing that I do is send a message with all of the wins and success stories to the team to remind everyone of what we accomplished over the year.

I've found that this helps keep up continuous improvement in the new year. Since people have been taking time off, it could be hard to figure out what changes to make. It could be hard to decide if you want to make a change or what change to make if members of the team aren't around to contribute. Digging back into ideas that everyone thought were good ideas seems safe and can help the team keep the spirit of experimentation and process improvement up at a time when it's harder to do.

Thanks All. Yes, I guess the whole purpose is to ensure before the Christmas/New Year break, team should reflect on how things have shaped up from last year, with specific examples ; since most of the members I am talking about are there for long, and also at high level the focus for next year. Liked the writing of notes/wishes to Santa. Thanks Simon.

What I am really interested in, along with an agenda, of course, is to come-up with some innovative way to conduct it; which will have a global connect; like movies, books, cartoons etc..Any tips, would be helpful.

I guess the whole purpose is to ensure before the Christmas/New Year break, team should reflect on how things have shaped up from last year, with specific examples ; since most of the members I am talking about are there for long, and also at high level the focus for next year

There can be trailing indicators for which it takes up to a year (or more) to gather feedback. My advice however is not to try and inspect and adapt at such long intervals. Consider having a rolling planning horizon instead, which allows feedback to be acted on at the earliest opportunity. This might reasonably be done every Sprint. Remember that, in Scrum, we ought to try and minimize the "leap of faith" anyone has to take before seeing results.

A year is very ambitious. Attempting a retrospective of some sort, at such an interval, may result in a "sugar-high" where attendees think they are applying validated learning, but following up then proves unworkable. There's a reason why Sprints are limited to a maximum of one calendar month.

If you really do intend to have an annual retrospective of some kind, make sure you are quite clear on what it is that you intend to inspect and adapt, whether it be product, process or something else, and who will be accountable for outcomes.