Retrospective between agile coaches
hi there agile people,
Context:
I am part of an Agile Coaches team in a strongly tech driven company, enabling agility for the entire organisation. The Scrum Master role is a separate one, embedded in each team. We are currently a team of 6, highly autonomous, defining our own purpose, strategy and metrics.
We have decided to run a retrospective, which we haven't done is some time, i'll be moderating.
Question:
how would you go about moderating a retrospective session with coaches highly skilled in agile? or better said how do you go about cooking a meal for chefs? :)
Kind regards,
Adrian.
As Agile Coaches, your perspective is more organizationally-based, and more focused on Agile Maturity and nurturing the growth along, but I think a lot of the questions, topics, and approaches still apply.
What is going well? What do you feel we should celebrate? What isn't going according to plan? What is causing us issues/pain? What is one thing you wish you could have done differently, or wish you could do differently going forward?
Just my 2 cents. Good luck!
Suppose a coach has worked with your team several jours or workshops.
What could be your ideal outcomes ?
You can maybe try modified version of Lean coffee http://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/
> " We have decided to run a retrospective, which we haven't done is some time, i'll be moderating."
Why? As in: What is the goal of the retrospective? Try to assess the expectation your fellow coaches have of the retrospective and craft a goal. A retrospective without a goal is unfocussed and ineffective. If you don't know the goal beforehand, you cannot select the tools (retrospective activities) that best lead to the desired outcome.
The menu for the meal should include:
- A critique of the sponsored vision for organizational change - is it still appropriate or can it be improved?
- An assessment of the strength and quality of organizational sponsorship for the scope of change which is envisioned.
- How is the role of the transformation backlog owner working out? What about relations with the organizational sponsor and the coaches?
- Inspection and adaptation of the transformation (change) backlog, assuming there is no separate event for this. Are the right change items there, and in the right order? Do they leverage clear agile patterns and practices? Are they coachable, small in scope, clearly targeted, and do they have clear and suitable acceptance criteria?
- Can the process for articulating acceptance criteria for change items on the backlog be improved? In other words, are the changes being coached actually resulting in the empirical benefits which are expected in order to achieve the sponsored vision?
- What are the outcomes of any agile health checks being conducted for each team, including the ability of those teams to self organize, inspect and adapt both product and process, evidence good Sprint control, and create integrated product increments of release quality? Do we need to add or change anything on the transformation backlog?
- How well are Scrum Masters taking over the coaching role for their own teams? What does this mean for the organization's transformation backlog, and can the coaches now move on to other challenges?
- Finally, a look at the transformation heartbeat itself, and at this opportunity for a coaching retrospective. Is this event being held at the right frequency? Do we have the right attendees, or are important stakeholders missing? What can we do better?
thank you for the great ideas guys, i've cherry picked some to use!
@Ian, this is one pertinent list of questions to discuss in a transformational context, very helpful, thank you :)