12 Steps to Running Sprint Retrospectives Like a Pro: Step 12

by Scrum Alliance, John McFadyen

Join Certified Scrum Trainer® John McFadyen for a 12-part video series exploring the scrum event known as the sprint retrospective. Throughout the series, he’ll share tips and tricks for creating impactful, engaging, and effective sprint retrospectives for your teams.

The final tip for running a sprint retrospective like a pro is to read the book Retrospective Antipatterns by Aino Corry, 2020. This is a great book for learning the antipatterns that can occur when facilitating the retrospective meeting.

McFayden says he’s a big fan of learning from other people’s mistakes. Understanding patterns is a really powerful tool to have in your retrospective toolbox, and an antipattern is actually a solution to a problem.

This book describes a lot of antipatterns with retrospectives and techniques that other scrum masters have used to facilitate them, and why they haven’t worked, so you can avoid making the same mistake.

By reading this book, you can fine-tune the way you’re conducting retrospectives. Reading and reflecting on your work as a scrum master helps you improve so that your team continues to improve.

Here’s a brief description of the book:

Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Retrospectives Antipatterns introduces antipatterns related to structure, planning, people, distributed teams, and more. Corry shares traps she's encountered and mistakes she's made over more than a decade of leading retrospectives and then presents proven solutions. With her insights and guidance, you can run enjoyable retrospectives that deliver concrete improvements and real value—or at the very least recognize when you are making the same mistake as the author!

You’ll learn to:

Create a common language, actionable solutions, and proven plans for solving the retrospective problems you'll encounter most often.
Recognize symptoms, assess tradeoffs, and refactor your current situation into something better.
Plan more effectively: decide who should attend and facilitate, when to schedule your retrospective, and how much time to set aside.
Handle “people” problems: deal with negativity, silence, distrust, disillusionment, loudmouths, and cultural differences.
Facilitate better “virtual” retrospectives, with tips for online retrospectives included in each antipattern.

Need to watch any of the other videos in the series? Find the links below!

RL_153_12-steps-running-retrospectives-like-pro-step

Presenter(s)

Scrum Alliance

John McFadyen

John McFadyen is an Executive and Enterprise Agile Coach with proven experience working on some of the UK and Europe’s largest, most complex Agile Transformations. As a Certified Scrum Trainer, John brings a wealth of experience as an Agile coach, Agile practitioner and software developer into each of the 4 core courses he provides. Certified ScrumMaster Certified Scrum Product Owner Advanced Certified ScrumMaster Certified Scrum Professional ScrumMaster The war stories, the insights into successful Agile transformations and everything he has learned from coaching high-performance Agile teams combines to provide course delegates with a unique, compelling training experience that transforms as much as it empowers. John is passionate about cultivating high-performing Agile organisations that unleash people’s passion and creativity. As an Agile coach, John has worked with C-Suite level individuals on cultivating and embedding Business Agility within the DNA or large organisations. In addition to being an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, John is also a founding partner of Agile Centre. As an entrepreneur, John works at growing Agile capability with clients from around the world. Agile Centre has fast established itself as a pioneer in the cultivation and development of Agile capabilities within organisations great and small. John leverages his experience as an Agile coach, consultant and trainer to help organisations embed Agile values, mindsets and develop a high-performance culture of Business Agility. John is also deeply invested in growing the next generation of great Scrum Masters via the Agile Coaching Academy. An 18-month journey that helps practitioners move through an apprenticeship in Agile coaching through to journeyman and practising Agile coach. John is also an international keynote speaker, author and Business Agility mentor. Visit www.johnmcfadyen.com for more insights into John’s writing, thought leadership and mentorship.