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Retrospective or Not

Last post 08:04 am February 14, 2017 by Sanjay Saini
2 replies
ASHWINKUMAR IYER
08:02 pm February 13, 2017

Hello Professional Masters!

I have been working as a scrum master for the past eight months. The team is geographically distributed team in 3 locations with 2 different timezone. I am at a location where I am the only 1 working for the team, and the other 2 locations we have team members. Me apart from working as a Scrum Master is also working as a QA in the same project.

Our is a 13 member team(ok, I know we should only have 9 at max, we tried different variations and we decided to stick as one team), we generally have our stand-up, planning, retrospective on call, and it works well to certain extent. And we have a 2 week sprint.

However, our retrospective is never productive and effective, and the recent retrospective, was the most dismal of all.

We have several problems here:
1) We are located in 3 different location- Not sure if this is really a problem
2) We never have seen each other. No video calls
3) Everyone is at the desk busy doing something else, which apparently I cant do much about.
4) People are always distracted, and think deliverable is first and second is the process
5) Cracking unwanted jokes.

I am all out of my options to the bring retrospective back on track and make it useful, and moreover, we have even decided to do away with retrospective, which I am absolutely against!

I am here, to know from experts, their experience and seek guidance on how can I take and make the retrospective more focused and get the most out off the team member, and make it more playful. I dont want to to be always talking, I want the team member to open.

Looking for some great ideas!

Thanks,
Ashwin

Ian Mitchell
10:07 pm February 13, 2017

> ...it works well to certain extent

To what extent do you suspect it works well?

Is there good evidence of teamwork and satisfied stakeholders? Are the team framing valuable Sprint Goals and meeting them? Is a useful increment of release quality being made available to the Product Owner each Sprint?

Sanjay Saini
08:04 am February 14, 2017


Besides the Sprint Retrospective what about the other Scrum Events, are they going well? Though Scrum doesn't force anything on the team distribution but we all know the impact of a distributed team across multiple locations.

What about giving away the SM role to someone at a location which has maximum number of team members?

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