Challenging Sprint Retrospectives

An essential question when doing Scrum seems to be, “How can we make our Retrospectives more fun?"

It makes me wonder about the value of engagement, human energy, and bottom-up inspiration. It makes me wonder because Done Increments are at the heart of the empiricism and the Agility of Scrum.

If Scrum was to be reduced to one purpose, and one purpose only, that is the creation of a Done Increment in a Sprint.

So few teams are able to actually deliver releasable versions of a product, Sprint after Sprint after Sprint. And this problem is only compounded when multiple teams are involved in delivering a product.

Understanding that Scrum Masters are all about helping teams and organizations understand and enact Scrum, the following might be a great way to start your next Sprint Retrospectives:

• Scrum Master: “Have we delivered a Done, releasable version of the product this Sprint?”
• Team: “No.”
• Scrum Master: “What can we do about that?”

How will this help to kick off a professionally challenging and fun Sprint Retrospective? How will this question initiate a deep reflection on improvements that will help teams and the organization get more out of employing Scrum? How can this be a start for some fun experiments in the next Sprint?

Committed, connected and engaged people might consider these solutions:

• Increased effectiveness through collaboration, autonomy, and self-organization.
• Skills and knowledge sharing (training, communities).
• Engineering practices, and standards.
• Infrastructure, tooling, and automation.
• Quality standards and guidelines.
• Removal of Impediments.
• Elimination of low value (requirements, projects).

I wish you fierce, focused, and purposeful Sprint Retrospectives. It’ll be seriously fun. Fun and purpose go hand in hand