BONUS: Aino Corry on how to prepare for and facilitate for Distributed Retrospectives

Scrum Masters all over the world make a significant effort to get better at facilitating retrospectives… Until they have to host a Distributed Retrospective. At that point, we learn that all you learned about facilitating retrospectives is still useful, but not nearly enough!

Preparing, hosting, and facilitating a Distributed Retrospective is a completely different challenge.

The 4 things that you need to make Distributed Retrospectives work

There’s no single recipe to make Distributed Retrospectives work. But there are certain ingredients you need to make sure you have in place. It’s important to try to have all of these 4 ingredients in place.

Those 4 ingredients are:

1. get people to participate actively
2. get everybody on video (if at all possible)
3. pace them forward all the time (e.g. using strict timeboxes)
4. use round-robin (or some other technique) to get everybody to talk

 

The most common anti-patterns in Distributed Retrospectives

As with all other ceremonies, there are some things that are hard to get right and often go wrong. Here’s a short list to keep in mind and prepare to counter-act:

About Aino Corry

Aino is a consultant and agile coach, and has Ph.d in computer science from the last century focused on design patterns and language constructs in programming languages, 20 years as a teacher in academia and industry

You can link with Aino Corry on LinkedIn and connect with Aino Corry on Twitter.