Wednesday, 6 July 2016

Retrospective: The End

People leave. Occasionally, this will be the SM. This retro is dealing with the handover to the next SM and acting as a exit interview for the SM.

The goal behind this is to give the new SM insight into how the team regard their process, what they need help with and most importantly what they want to keep. This was to give my new SM a good idea of what the teams buttons where so he would get off to a flying start with the team.

It also helped me see some improvements that I could carry with me to my next team. Some I knew about some I needed to acknowledge. SM's, like teams aim to continuously improve.

The icebreaker I used was a simple game where I wrote up some numbers and asked the team what they thought they correlated to. I went back to when this team formed and found totals for: Number of Sprints, Total number of stories, Total number of points, Longest Lead time and average velocity.

Then we did a happiness radar to give the overview of what the team think about 3 areas:
  • People - the people they work with both in and out of the team
  • Technology - the kit they work with on their local, development and integration environments
  • Process - the way they work
I gave my team 2 votes each and they created this:


Thinking like my new SM, I would be thinking "Hmm, I wonder what's up with the technology?" and maybe "So, observe for a while since these guys think everything is working just fine".

The last section was just a post it session around some key questions:

  • What should the SM leave alone?
  • Is there something the new SM should look into straight away?
  • What are our strengths?
  • What does Richard do that our new SM should do too?

As usual, it's the little things that made me chuckle - biscuits, always a favorite:



When the SM arrived I went through what the team had said and gave them a rough history of the team so he had some context. Not only did I find this process quite therapeutic, I think it helped the team know that the next SM would help them continue on their chosen path rather than make them take a different route.



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