Exploring Kaizen, Story Cubes, and Creative Techniques

This chapter delves into the pronunciation and origin of 'Kaizen', discusses using story cubes to spark creativity within a team, and introduces an innovative technique using icons to tell sprint stories on a whiteboard, inviting listener participation in an experiment to receive story cubes.

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Episode notes

Today’s topic is all about retrospectives! A retrospective is a short meeting for project teams to reflect on the most recent stage of their project, analyze their processes, and identify issues or things they can do better, moving forward.

Joining Dan Neumann today is return guest — and his colleague at AgileThought — Sam Falco. Sam is an Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Professional with an extensive background leading Agile development teams.

Dan and Sam dive deep into discussing Agile retrospectives, going over the five phases of the widely accepted framework from Esther Derby’s and Diana Larsen’s book, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. They also discuss what makes an effective retrospective, some of the failure patterns in unsuccessful retrospectives, and some great resources on retrospectives to follow up on after this week’s show!

Key Takeaways

The 5 phases of the Agile Retrospectives framework:

Set the Stage
Gather Data
Generate Insights
Decide What to Do
Close the Retrospective

What makes an effective retrospective?

Engage the team in ‘setting the stage’ activities (as it is imperative for the team to effectively work together)
Track useful and pertinent data to bring to the retrospective
Leverage an experimental mindset
Generate insights by digging deeper beyond the superficial issues by using the 5 Whys
Narrow down the list, make the list doable/actionable, hold people accountable, and follow through
Show appreciation for your teammates
Ask for feedback as a facilitator to improve future retrospectives

What are some failure patterns?