Keeping Retrospectives Fresh

by Laura Richardson, Shahzad Zafar, Ben Linders

Retrospectives are great . . . except when they're not. Without care and attention, retrospectives become stale, boring, and ineffective. And this is especially likely with distributed teams, where it is easy to put yourself on mute and start answering email instead of focusing on your team. In this Collaboration at Scale webinar, we explored how you can keep retrospectives fresh, engaging, and impactful. We'll focus especially on helping distributed teams identify the frameworks that allow them to explore different ways they can improve performance.

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If you’re a Scrum Alliance member, complete How Successful Teams Practice Sprint Retrospectives, an online course in the Learning Journey. Designed especially for scrum masters, this material takes a deep dive into recognizing anti-patterns in relation to the effectiveness of your team’s retrospectives. If you’re not a member, check out these benefits of membership!

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Presenter(s)

Laura Richardson

Laura is passionate about technology and about helping customers find powerful solutions to pressing problems. She brings 20 years of sales and management experience to Conteneo Inc., including seven years at Uptime Resources where she ran the IT professional services division. Her team managed all aspects of technology for small and mid-sized businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Uptime Resources, Laura was the business development director at E-Color where she and her team launched an image and color optimization engine to improve the reliability of online images used by large e-commerce sites from companies like Bloomingdales and J Crew. The seeds for her love of technology were planted during the four years she spent with ObjectSpace. As Sales Director for both the East and then the West Coast, she helped large Fortune accounts successfully adopt object-oriented technology and iterative development practices which was very rewarding. Laura holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and has also worked on an MA in Psychology. She lives in the East Bay with her husband and two children and challenges herself a few times a year by participating in a ToughMudder Adventure Race.

Shahzad Zafar

Shahzad Zafar is an Engineering Manager at Cerner Corporation. He is also an Agile Coach, facilitates several Agile trainings and has been leading Agile development teams since 2009 at Cerner. Shahzad has a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2005 and also received his Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Kansas in 2009. He joined Cerner in 2005 as a software developer, working on C++ and Java. He got the benefit of seeing projects being run in a waterfall methodology before transitioning to Agile development. As an Agile champion and coach, Shahzad gets the opportunity to work with other teams to offer support and guidance to setup productive and successful teams by leveraging Lean/Agile methodologies. Currently, Shahzad is leading a cloud services development business unit and the Agile Center of Excellence at Cerner.

Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. As an adviser, coach, and trainer, he helps organizations by deploying effective software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration, communication, and professional development to deliver business value to customers. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, and Quality and a well-known speaker and author. He shares his experiences on a bilingual blog (Dutch and English), as an editor for Culture and Methods at InfoQ, and as an expert in communities such asComputable, Quora, DZone, and TechTarget. Follow him on twitter: @BenLinders.