How to do Retro properly, and implement durable Change?

5 min readFeb 5, 2022

The best way you can improve software development process in your company, and enhance your team performance, is to look back in time and investigate what can be done better in the future. However, simple reflection is just not enough. You must do some steps to make Retrospectives efficient and effective. And I am not saying about you having a talk with the team about (1) what went well? (2) what didn’t go so well, and (3) what can we improve. I am talking about the durable implementation of improvements. For that, you need to have a plan. A change plan should be an outcome of every retrospective. Otherwise, your team will come up with the same ideas over and over again. Eventually, It’ll lead to irritation, and your team will finally give up with the retro.

This post will not be about meeting preparations, conducting retrospective, or who should attend this meeting. What I want to talk about is how to take the outcomes of the Retrospective, and make them happen.

The goal of a leader is to get sh*t done. Are you a leader? If you consider yourself as a leader, then take accountability for the results. Don’t focus on the retrospective outputs like what can do better. Rather than, you should be focused on the outcomes.

In this guide, I’ll teach you how, and I’ve divided it into the following chapters:

Evaluate Retrospective outputs
Create a plan
Monitor and Control changes
Make conclusions

Enjoy your reading!

(1) Evaluate Retrospective outputs

Take a few minutes with your team to walk through what you did during the last retrospective meeting, and think about what you discovered. At this stage, you probably have:

— Buy-in information — how are your team members feeling today? How do they score the last Sprint? Or, what is your team’s temperature? This information will probably determine how many sticky notes you have regarding what went well, what didn’t go so well, and actions. Retrospectives are the only meeting I know, during which people are keener on talking about what went well rather than what didn’t go so well*.

— What went well? — on retro, people are paying more attention to this column. It somehow can be related to the fact that they are evaluating their work. You should use this information to check whether the improvements from the last retrospective were implemented or not.

— What went wrong? — nobody wants to say that they did something wrong. However, If you want to support Continuous Improvement, this column is crucial. Encourage your team to brainstorm what didn’t go so well and can be improved. Together with the action plan, it will be the baseline for your CI process.

— Actions — it is probably the most important part of the retrospective. Your team has already identified the key issues to improve, and now it’s time to make and implement an improvement plan. Actions column will be the baseline for your change plan.

Great, you have conducted the retrospective meeting. But, what now?

(2) Create a Plan

In a few words, preparing the plan from the retrospective meeting can be divided into the following steps:

Prepare
Prioritize
Plan

You can remember them as the acromion 3P.

Prepare (retrospective backlog)

Each item that can be improved should have the corresponding action from the meeting. Some of them will be trivial, and relatively easy to implement and manage. However, there will also be some issues, which cannot be addressed quickly and require a significant amount of effort.

What can you do to handle “big” issues? Well, you do the same as with the items you have in Product Backlog — decompose big issues into a bunch of smaller issues, which can be relatively easy to digest.

At the end of this step, you will have a list of the items your team wants to improve. Now, you need to shift your focus to the most important items.

Prioritize

Walk with your team through the list of items to implement after the retrospective meeting. Ask your team members to think what are the most important items to implement. I will not talk about how you can prioritize the items, as there are many techniques you can use**.

At the end of this step, you want to have an ordered list of improvements to implement with the most important on the top and less on the bottom. Think about what can be put away for a moment, and what needs to be done. Draw a line through the list to separate what will be done soon, and what will be pushed to the backlog, in which you will store your ideas from retrospectives.

And, now it’s time to create a plan to implement it!

Plan

Talk with your team:

Who will take responsibility for particular retrospective item
When do the team expect t to be achieved (usually 2 weeks, because most most of the teams are using Scrum methodology or its Scaled Scrum version)
How are you going to measure it? You need to clearly define with your team, how you can measure the success

As you can see it’s pretty similar to the SMART technique which is used for setting the goals to make your plan.

BUT, do you think that after the plan is created, your job is finished? Definitively no!

(3) Monitor and Control Changes

No no no, life doesn’t work like that. The fact that you and your team members agreed to implement improvements doesn’t mean that the improvements will really be implemented.

What you have already done has a name — delegation. You have already delegated the responsibility for the implementation of retrospective outcomes to your team members. But, there is always only one person accountable for delegated items — and this person is you.

You need to check with your team members, whether they have achieved what was expected. Have unregular meetings with your team members to gather feedback, whether they have achieved their goals.

Backlog items from retrospective meetings should be treated the same as your day to day work. If you can improve your team performance at least by 1% each time they implement actions from the retrospectives, your team will be outstanding, and everybody outside of the team would like to work with you.

(4) Conclude

At the next retrospectives, you should summarize what was achieved from the last retro, and how it is improving your team’s performance. Discuss with your team members how do they feel about that. Try to moderate the meeting, so that everybody had an opportunity to tell his/her opinion.

Implementing actions from retrospectives is a Team Spirit building exercise. If people see the progress they are more likely to trust each other and collaborate. Persuade your people that the implementation of retrospectives actions is a long-run exercise. The goal is to compound good habits over time and achieve exponential performance acceleration. There is always something that can be done better…

Appendix

*=Negative Bias, people are used to focus their attention on bad things. We as a human species concentrate on what went wrong. That’s why most of the information provided in news are bad news.