When people are new to Scrum, the Sprint Retrospective can be viewed as an “Agile” meeting or a “Scrum” meeting. This may lead to rushing through the Retrospective or skipping them all together due to time constraints.

The Sprint Retrospective is the most important event in the Scrum Framework.  It gives the Scrum Team transparency into how they are doing work and the chance to inspect and adapt - improving their process. The intent is to have a process improvement, one “kaizen”, with each Retrospective thus improving the Scrum Team’s ability to continuously improve.

It’s important to keep Retrospectives from falling into a rut.  Keep them fresh and exciting. Avoid repeating the same Sprint Retrospective technique two sprints in a row. As Scrum Masters and coaches we want to challenge and push our teams to get better.  A great way to do that is introducing different formats to get people thinking differently.

Ideas for additional formats or facilitation techniques may be learned from coaches, other Scrum Masters, searching online or books focused on this topic such as Agile Retrospectives by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby.

 If the Scrum Master as active facilitator needs a fresh voice at a Retrospective or feels like they would like another perspective, how about asking another Scrum Master to lead a Retrospective?  Maybe there is a member of the team who would like to lead one.

 With a little preparation, Sprint Retrospectives will aide in any Scrum Team’s continuous improvement. To learn more about Scrum, please visit us at http://collaborativeleadershipteam.com.