12 Steps to Running a Sprint Retrospective Like a Pro: Step 9

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.

In tip nine, McFadyen recommends reading The Retrospective Handbook by Patrick Kua. This book builds upon the 2006 book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, which has been the go-to book for scrum masters for a long time.

While The Retrospective Handbook is from 2013, many of the concepts are still applicable today. This book helps you learn from people with more experience and shares common mistakes they’ve made that you can avoid.

There’s a lot in this book about facilitating retrospectives with remote teams, which, since the pandemic, is something that most people are dealing with today.

This book is a quick and easy read, and it will help you validate your own thoughts and experiences while learning from others.

Here’s a quick summary of the book:

Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better. This book condenses eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams.

You’ll learn:

Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
Picking just the right materials
Facilitating retrospectives with ease
Dealing with common retrospective smells
Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
A checklist for preparation
Ensuring retrospectives result in change

So if you’re looking for new retrospective ideas, make sure to give this book a read!

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

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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.