The Scrum Master Guide to Choosing Retrospective Techniques v.2: Based on a Team's Stage of Development

By Mishkin Berteig and Jerry Doucett

As a Scrum Master, you create the conditions for your Scrum teams to improve, and the most important toolkit you have is the retrospective. Yet choosing a retrospective technique is hard and often feels like guess-work.

In "The Scrum Master Guide to Choosing Retrospective Techniques", Mishkin Berteig and Jerry Doucett provide a systematic approach to choosing retrospective techniques for any team. Their combined thirty-plus years of experience working with Agile and Scrum teams is distilled into a compact guidebook for you to boost your team from one level to the next, over and over using retrospective techniques.

The book is divided into sections based on the stages of team development: not (yet) a team, forming, storming, norming, performing, high-performance and adjourning. Each section explains how to tell if a team is at that stage and which retrospective techniques are likely to be most appropriate. As well, each section provides guidance on how to use the techniques if your team is co-located or virtual so that you can always be sure of success.

Applying -inappropriate- retrospective techniques to your team can diminish team cohesion and even reduce trust in your abilities as a Scrum Master. This guide book helps you avoid this common problem.

Buy this book, and choose the right retrospective technique for your team!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berteig Consulting Inc.
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780993606472

Book preview

The Scrum Master Guide to Choosing Retrospective Techniques v.2

By Mishkin Berteig

and Jerry Doucett

v.2

Based on a Team’s Stage of Development

Copyright 2021 by Berteig Consulting Inc.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

ISBN: 978-0-9936064-7-2

Berteig Consulting Inc.

96 Carnegie Lane

London, Ontario, Canada, N6C 5X2

Table of Contents

Introduction      7

Your Group’s Stage      9

Group (Not a Team)      11

What is Needed in a Group?      11

Technique: Quality and Efficiency      12

Technique: Context Obstacles      14

Technique: Anonymous Plusses and Deltas      17

Forming      23

What is Needed in Forming?      23

Technique: Explore and Uncover Expectations and Norms      24

Technique: Constellation Exercise      26

Storming      31

What is Needed in Storming?      32

Technique: Tackling the Taboo      32

Technique: Anchors and Sails      34

Norming      37

What is Needed in Norming?      38

Technique: Remember the Future      38

Technique: Driving to Outcomes      39

Performing      43

What is Needed in Performing?      44

Technique: Circles of Influence      44

Technique: The 4 L’s      46

High-Performing      49

What is Needed in High-Performing?      50

Technique: The Health Check      50

Technique: The Force Field Change      54

Adjourning      59

What is Needed When Adjourning?      60

Technique: Deep Reflection      61

Technique: What Went Well and What Needs Improvement      63

In Conclusion      67

Appendix: Retrospective Guidelines      69

References      71

Introduction

You are a Scrum Master, your team is struggling and you want to help.  You have a thousand different ideas but you also have a nagging sense of urgency and you’re not quite sure where to begin.

Without trying to be overly simplistic, one option is to facilitate a retrospective.  After all, several reasons for retrospectives are to: build shared ownership of issues, foster team collaboration, identify potential causes and remedies of challenges, and create growth and learning opportunities for the team.

So a retrospective may seem appropriate but there are references promoting hundreds of retrospective techniques.  Different approaches serve different purposes and different teams have different needs.  So how can you quickly cut through the noise and choose an appropriate one?

The blunt answer is you won’t really know unless you have experience, and that takes considerable time and effort. Suppose there are two hundred documented retrospective techniques, and you try a new one every iteration or Sprint, and your iterations are one week long... That’s four years(!) to try them all.

You could always take your best guess based on research, but that may introduce unknown risks to an already challenged team.  You could seek sound advice from a coach or more experienced Scrum Master, but that could introduce delays as it creates reliance on an external dependency and a need to effectively articulate the situation to them.  Or by embracing the Agile spirit of fail fast, kaizen and continuous improvement you could try leveraging an existing model, attempting one change or improvement (in this case, a specific retrospective approach or technique), and then applying new knowledge as you go.

This article embraces the faster, leaner learn and apply approach and specifically leverages the Tuckman stages of team development model to help you quickly choose a potentially suitable retrospective technique.

In this book, we will use the word group to refer to any people who are trying to work as a single Scrum Team. The word team will be limited to the members of a single Scrum Team who are on the Tuckman development journey together. Not all Scrum Teams are on that journey!

The Tuckman model describes five progressive stages that a team may experience when working and deciding together.  Using the diagram above as reference (to overlay relative team performance), the Tuckman stages are: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning.  I also believe that under circumstances some teams may be able to achieve a sixth stage called High Performing (or sometimes Hyper-Performing), so I have added that stage. To round out the discussion, you may sometimes work with a group of people that hasn’t really started the development journey yet or who have left the path of team development, so I will address that situation as well.

2nd Edition Note: All techniques have been updated to include a section on how to adapt to all-virtual attendees. A retrospective with mixed in-person and virtual participants is strongly discouraged!

Your Group’s Stage

To use this book effectively, you must determine the stage of development of your group. This table will help you see the key characteristics that tell you the stage of development for your team. The more teams you work with