You can now close your retrospective in Retrium! The new Wrap-Up phase allows you to easily review your team's feedback and ensure you're getting the most out of your sprint retrospective.
Let's take a look
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's dive into, what is the Wrap-Up Phase? Think of this phase as a valuable safe space that allows your entire team to provide honest feedback on how they feel the retrospective went.
The Wrap-Up phase isn't a space to rate project processes or the effectiveness of your action items. It's a space for your team to assess the effectiveness of the retrospective itself. While it may be tempting to simply let your team go after deciding what to do, the Wrap-Up phase is an important time to generate insights that ensure your team is making the most of its time. By reviewing your retrospective history, your team can always be working towards continuous retrospective improvement.
No matter what type of agile team you are -- a remote team, in-office, or hybrid -- it's easy to integrate the Wrap-Up phase into your sprint retrospective.
In the last few minutes of your meeting, move on to the Wrap-Up phase. From here, the team will be able to vote on a scale of 1 - 5 on how they felt about the retrospective as a use of their time, with 1 being "definitely not worth our time" and 5 being "an excellent use of our time."
Did the scrum team feel that the meeting resulted in a productive action plan for future sprints? Or did they feel the retro was a waste of time invested? Alternatively, maybe the team felt that the retro was simply break-even on time spent. For Retrium users, you can easily rate your retro at the close of every column-based retrospective with a few button clicks. And (as always) votes in Retrium are anonymous, so you can obtain honest feedback while establishing a sense of psychological safety in a blameless space.
Before your team members choose their rating, encourage them to consider if the retro:
If you're new to the technique, and the first round of results disappoint you, don't worry. That only means you have room to grow! 🌱
Agile Retrospective Expert and Retrium Advisor, Esther Derby, shares that one of the easiest ways to improve is to simply ask the team: "What would make it better?"
“I think some people have a hard time thinking of how to make things better; they've been trained in being critical. Asking them what would make it better, changes people's mindset and engagement in the conversation. When people get really negative I'll say 'it sounds like you have a vision of how you want things to be' or 'if you can imagine a really effective meeting what would it be like?'"
- Esther Derby
Just make sure that you're moving forward with specific goals to improve.
As any business leader or investment aficionado will tell you, you always want to get returns on money invested. Preferably with a substantial profit! 💰
The same holds true for another precious commodity: time. Your team's time is limited and valuable, and you should seek to use it wisely. An agile retrospective should directly benefit your team, and that means they should walk away with the sense that their investment resulted in clear ideas for improvement.
Gathering feedback through the Wrap-Up phase is a valuable way of generating insights that may improve your overall retrospective processes.
Maybe your team feels that they need to transform their current action items into SMART actions. Or perhaps they feel that they need to meet more frequently, such as on a daily basis, instead of just once a week.
Each team will have a unique set of needs, but the only way to fulfill those needs is to get to the root of how your group is feeling about each retrospective meeting. By closing your meetings in the Wrap-Up phase, and continuously reviewing the results with your Retrium Retrospective History, you can see how your team has increased the value of your meetings overall. Improved engagement, efficiency, and productivity are just around the corner. 😉
Retrium organizes all of your previous retrospective meetings in one place. You can not only see a timeline of past conversations, but you can also view exactly what notes and actions were generated. At any time your team members can easily examine the action plan checklist to provide updates on item progress. There’s no limit to the number of insights you can gain by examining past meetings and reflecting on how far you’ve come.
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