Improvements or complains – choose one

Sprint retrospective meeting is a time when all team members can share what they are happy about, what bothers them, what is worth being taken a deeper look at and what can be or already is problematic. It is a really good idea to practice doing those meetings even if you are not doing Scrum and have no Sprints at all.
You just have to agree for some period of time after which meeting will be provided.

Sprint retrospectives give you a possibility to blurt out everything what’s on your mind. Dedicated time makes it comfortable. You are not looking at your computer. You are not in a rush because of “another meeting is in five minutes”. It’s scheduled, it’s planned and this is time for your Team.

Yeah, not completely. And to be honest, when you are starting to think about those meetings in this way in the same moment you are starting to do malfunction retrospectives. Why is that?

Are we doing things that needs to be done?

Those from you, who use Scrum in their work knows daily stand-up meetings and three famous questions to ask and answer:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• What obstacles are impeding my progress?

ladies, wall and sprints

improvements in team in progress

I recetly put our's sprint backlog on the wall. It's more readable, it requires no additional effort to know what is going on and you are always up to date. I wrote more about this here. We are still using reguar tools to manage sprints, but wall is used not for managing purpose, but for visualization. And from what I can see, everyone likes this idea.

The wall was only a first step to increase motivation in team and identification with product, that we are delivering. There are lot more in my head and I will definitely share everything just after I will have any observations.

Recently we startet to do meetings, which main purpose is to know our's customer better, to know what they want to get and to know what we need to beware. I need to admit, that I see many positive aspects of them and after few more meetings I'll describe how it works in our team.

Use your wall

In my current project we're using Jira to track the progress in project, to storing backlog items and so on. And after few years I need to admit that is really great tool, at least is perfect for ours needs.

Ok, it's almost perfect - it's completely unrelated with motivation in our team.
Why I think so? Because we're looking at it only when one of us needs to do something there. Team members moves issues from one column to the other, product owner sorts backlog whenever there is a need, we are adding notes, attachments or we made clarification for the issues and many other things, but all of those are activities related with project life cycle. Not with motivation.

Never postpone meetings

Recently, one of my friends asked me a question:

"What will you do if your's daily stand-up starts at 9:30 and one of your teammates, who went half hour ago to the shop and should already back, is still absent?"

I told him that answer is simple - I will call him and ask how long it will take for him to get back to us. If it won't be long, we will wait for him.