1. Retrospective
Søren Weiss
in a Kanban team
Agile Coach
Twitter: @sorenweiss
An example

2. About this presentation
• The presentation serves to share an agenda which can be used to
facilitate a retrospective in a scrum team or in a kanban team.
• I facilitated the retrospective with a Danish kanban team (8 team
members) in April 2012.
• The team had implemented Kanban i December 2012. This was
the second retrospective session after starting doing Kanban.
• The team members were working in a maintenance organization
and were all highly skilled specialists.
• Duration of the session was 2 1/2 hours.

3. Retrospective
agenda
• Set the scene
• Hallway status
• Profile drawing
• Starfish
• SMART goal
• ROI by Fist of Five

4. Set the scene
• This was the team's
second retrospective. We
revisited the team's
signup request and their
motivation for adopting
an agile method and why
we ended up using
Kanban instead of scrum.
• I reminded the team on
the simple rules that they
follow by doing Kanban.

5. Hallway status
• I wanted a quick indication of how the mood was among
the team members (I hadn't visited them for two months). I
asked the question "if I instead of meeting you at this
retrospective session had met you in the hallway and I had
asked you how you were doing in the team, what would
you then have answered me?". I asked each teammember
to prepare a number (1-10) representing their level of
satisfaction. One by one the teammembers presented their
numbers followed by a very brief explanation. This exercise
gave a good indication of what the teammembers were
focusing on. And all opinions was heard.

6. Profile drawing
• The team members formed two groups. Each group drew a rich picture. Each
group/picture answered the questions:
1. What are we particularly good at doing in our team?
2. What are we particularly not good at doing in our team?
3. What are the main unsolved impediments at this point?
4. What are the biggest successes since the last retrospective?
• Only rule was "no using letters.
I mentioned to the team that the exercise could seem transcendent to some. I
acknowledged this and then encouraged the team members to overcome
potential blocking from participating (know you audience, culture etc.). I briefly
mentioned how being creative will help people producing good ideas/
suggestions, which were the reason for doing the retrospective.

8. Starfish
• Based on the information identified in the first two exercises the team members now
brainstormed to identify items to fit into the categories:
1. What should we start doing?
2. What should we stop doing?
3. What should we do more of?
4. What should we do less of?
5. What should we continue to do
The team did this exercise as one group. The rules: 1) nobody can veto suggestions, 2)
the teammember who puts up a suggestion briefly explains the sugggestion when
putting the item up on the wall. By doing the starfish exercise in this way you don't need
to spend time to identify doubles and the quality of the suggestions also increases.
Furthermore it feels like a team effort compared to if you create suggestions individually
or in smaller groups.

10. SMART goal
• The team had now identified several suggestions on what to do differently until the next
retrospective. It was now time to choose the most important things to do and to create
specific goals. The team choose among the items from the starfish exercise. I
deliberately did not ask the team to rank the suggestions before asking what would be
the most important thing to do differently. This approach fostered some great
disscussions. I should mention that this approach calls for the facilitator to assist the
more introvert team members to speak up.
• I timeboxed the creation of each goal to max 20 minutes. I supported the team to make
sure that each goal qualified to be a SMART goal. After creating a goal the team
accepted the goal and the team chose a "guardian angel" for the goal. This person's job
is to be the backstop for getting the goal implemented. I have over the years realized that
such a role is crucial for the success rate of implementing retrospective goals.
• As a facilitator I asked the team to make sure to make the goals simple and not too
ambitious. The team chose to go with three goals. This was according to the team a
realistic amount of goals.

11. Close the
retrospective
• By the time the team had
agreed on their this goals time
was running out and I asked the
teammembers to do a Fist of
Five on the question: "was this
retrospective worth investing 2
1/2 hours to do?". The team
members commented their FoF
and I took notes for process
improval proposals.

12. Reflections
• Even though the team was new to
the concept of doing retrospectives
they were very participating and they
produced numerous suggestions
and ideas.
• I heard these words during the
session:
• "That would be a cool thing to
start doing".
• "Ok, let's do that then".
• "Great that you are in on it".
• I even heard a "yes, we can!" :-)

13. Twitter: @sorenweiss