12 Steps to Running Sprint Retrospectives Like a Pro: Step 10

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.

For tip #10, McFayden shares the Timeline retrospective exercise. This is one he’s used often over the years when wanting to explore the cause and effect of why things happen. The Timeline is great for understanding when something on the team may have broken down or when something positive occurred.

The timeline you create can be a sprint, a quarter, or even a year long. If you have a particular problem your team is trying to solve, go back to when you believe that problem began.

McFayden shares how he used this exercise with a team that was successful and doing great work, but they couldn’t understand why the code build would occasionally break. By putting a timeline together, they began to recognize the pattern of when a new person joins the team, the build breaks. This awareness led the team to discuss the problem openly without placing blame. They discovered that they needed to alter the onboarding process so new team members understood their process.

While this team was already high-performing, they knew there was still room for improvement. By going through the Timeline activity, they were able to solve a problem that wouldn’t have easily been solved.

The Timeline exercise is simple to facilitate. By using different color sticky notes for each role or part of the process, pattern recognition is easy to spot. The product owner may use purple stickies to indicate actions, whereas a tester might use another color.

The Timeline retrospective is a great activity if you want to look back at the end of the year or to solve a particular problem.

Key Takeaways:

The Timeline retrospective activity helps teams recognize patterns.
This retrospective should initiate open conversations.
The end result should be a solution to the problem.

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.