Agile Retrospectives: turning actionable insight into actions and outcomes

So you've ran a successful retrospective. Your team has generated lots of great ideas, and they've converged on a plan of action. What now? 

How do we help our teams follow up on the actions and decisions they've reached in a retrospective?

An agile / scrum process improvement log can help. 

It looks like this:

 


The log should be saved in a space that is accessible to the team for reference such as confluence. However, discuss with your team before you make it more publicly available. It's important that teams feel that retrospectives are a safe space for honesty and to share grievances. Having an improvement log publicly available may make teams feel less comfortable raising issues if they know senior stakeholders have an eye on the issues being raised. 

Having an improvement log is also useful for allowing the team to look back over all the issues that they've overcome, and reflect on whether past issues are still slowing things down.

It's often appropriate for an action coming out of a retrospective to be captured as a backlog item. This allows it to be considered and brought into the sprint. I've found that this works well for improvements that require some investigation. If resource isn't allocated to these types of tasks in sprint planning, it's unlikely they will get done, unless they can be picked up by someone outside of the scrum team (such as a tech lead, UX researcher, or systems architect). 

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