Retro for beginners with RetroKit

Retro for beginners with RetroKit!

As you most probably noticed recently lots of my attention is focused on inventions created by colleagues from Spotify. I must say to on Spotify Labs you can find quite a lot of interesting ideas related to Agile or leadership. One of this very simple, yet very useful, ideas is RetroKit.

Why RetroKit?

I think we all agree that Retrospective is one of the most important ceremonies/events in Agile world. Retrospective supports inspect and adapt loop and facilitates continuous improvement. Unfortunately not everybody is lucky enough to either have instant access to Agile Coach or have necessary skills and experience to comfortably conduct retrospective by himself/herself. To help in such cases it's good to have tools helping teams becoming self sufficient. Colleagues from Spotify encountered this problem and came up with tool for teams to start running retrospectives on their own in energizing and easy way. This was the RetroKit was born. 

What can I find inside?

You can download RetroKit from this location: https://spotifylabscom.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/retro-kit3.pdf
Inside you will find black and colorful pages. Black pages contains basic information about running retrospectives. You will find there information about:
  • Prime Directive
  • Spheres of influence - what it's worth putting effort into?
  • Proposed voting mechanisms
  • Proposed warm-up exercises
Colorful pages are concrete retrospective guides. All contains step-by-step information what do you need and how to conduct given retrospective. They also contain information about needed time. 
At the moment you can find there propositions for 5 basic retrospective formats which are very good start for new teams:
  • The sailboat
  • Plus/Delta
  • WARP (Wishes, Appreciations, Risks, Puzzles)
  • Proud & Worried
  • Lean Coffee

How to start with RetroKit?

Feeling excited about using it? It's fairly simple to start - the idea is to print RetroKit and make it easily available in your team area. When retrospective time comes you can select facilitator among your team members (it does not need to be a team lead, you can rotate "retro facilitator" function or use some other selection - maybe there are people who simply like doing that?). Facilitator gets familiar with black pages and selects a format from colorful pages. It's also good idea to package RetroKit with other needed materials (like sticky notes and pens) so team members will have it available all the time doing retro. As simple as that! I hope you will find it very useful :)



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