Closing the door on Retrospectives

Congratulations, you made it here! You successfully got your team to sit around the table and openly discuss ways in which you can improve future iterations. Valuable ideas are being shared. Constructive feedback is flying back and forth across the table as if people are being paid per suggestion. At moments, it feels like the Monday morning "opening bell" at the New York Stock Exchange.

Your job is to facilitate and capture these ideas and process them in real-time. Your job is to keep the conversation moving - to keep people from finger pointing and from diving too deep into individual issues. At times it can be overwhelming. At times you can lose track, and in turn, it’s possible to lose sight of the most important aspect of a Retrospective. You forget to "close" it.

Translation is Your Most Important Role

You see, in addition to playing part-time facilitator, process monitor, negotiator, and arbitrator ...you also own translation. Your most important job is to convert the conversation into a set of actionable items that can be measured and tracked across future iterations. If you walk away from the table without this, you've potentially lost most (if not all) of the value in hosting the Retrospective in the first place.

Change happens in the course of normal work. Teams who believe their retrospectives are a waste of time often keep their improvement plans completely separate from their daily work plans. When the plans are separate, no one finds time to do the "extra" work.

^{- Esther Derby & Diana Larson from their book "Agile Retrospectives"} 

I speak with customers all the time who are missing this all-to-important step. In their minds the Retrospective was a success. Great dialog was conducted, ideas were exchanged, and people seem to have been taking copious notes.

Success Comes with Defining 'What's Next'?

The reality is this: If you don't properly close out the Retrospective, the value is gone as soon as the last person walks out of the room. Everyone should be leaving with a clear understanding of "what’s next". A list of actions and owners should be documented. Actions should be time-boxed into sprints. The list should then be published and transparent to the team, and ideally to the rest of the organization. Improvement will not happen without action and transparency!

Are you leaving the door open on your Retrospectives?