Agile Retrospective: minimise disruption on an agile team when a team member leaves (30 - 45 minutes)

Staff turnover is a fact of life for all teams, including agile teams. 

A departing team member can turn out to be a blow, or a blessing, or anything in between. What is certain is that it will cause some disruption. 

The team may also need to go through a phase of re-forming and storming, as per Tuckman's stages of group development model.

Whatever happens with team dynamics, in the short term we can plan for a team members departure by making sure that s/he doesn't leave a knowledge gap in the team.

It's common for team members to become more expert in certain areas of the project or product that their team mates. Even if approaches such as pair programming can minimise this impact. For example, one team member may take on the responsibility of releasing code through the delivery pipeline. Even if this process is well documented there are often quirks that  an expert would do automatically without referring to documentation (or taking the time to document the quirk).

So, the following execise is design to extract knowledge from a departing team member before they leave.

The following exercise is based on the Problems & Actions retro from Fun Retrospectives

Instructions:

  • Create an empty board
  • Give everyone sticky notes of the same colour (e.g. green)
  • Ask everyone to write down all the things they rely on the departing team member for, or the knowledge that they rely on him for
  • Once this has been captured, hand everyone sticky notes of a different colour (e.g. yellow). Ask everyone to capture their thoughts about what the team could do to make sure that they team member doesn't leave a knowledge gap when they leave the team. 
  • Have a conversation / vote on the proposed actions and decide on a plan
  • Optional: when creating the board, write in the corners the areas that we seek to improve in a retrospective: tools, process, individuals, and interactions. These act as  prompts for the team to consider when thinking about what they rely on the departing team member for. 


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