{"id":10955,"date":"2020-11-10T09:13:18","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T08:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caroli.org\/en\/?p=10955"},"modified":"2021-04-22T12:36:30","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T11:36:30","slug":"retro-closing-the-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caroli.org\/en\/retro-closing-the-cycle\/","title":{"rendered":"Closing the Cycle – Retrospective Agenda and Template on Mural"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please find below a sequence of activities for a retrospective for a team that have just finished a cycle of work and is about to start the next one. On this post, I also share a Mural template I used for facilitating this remote retrospective.<\/p>\n

1. Context Set-up<\/h2>\n

This cycle is over (from June 1st to September 30th). Let\u00b4s have a retrospective to share how we felt about it and to talk about the learnings as we are now starting the work on the next cycle.<\/p>\n

2. Prime directive<\/h2>\n

I copied\/pasted the retrospective prime directive<\/a> and added it to the board.<\/p>\n

Retrospectives Prime Directive: \u2018Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

3. Draw your feelings (Check-in activity)<\/a><\/h2>\n

Draw your feelings is a great check-in activity for helping people express feelings for a retrospective meeting. Drawing enables people to express their emotions. Thus, it is a good starter before the main course activity, where participants typically will write notes and verbalize things and actions for the given context.<\/p>\n

The main idea behind \u201cdraw your feelings\u201d is to express a specific emotion, feeling or situation that you can\u2019t normally express with words. Drawing it helps people later verbalize the reason behind it. Therefore, it is a great check-in activity, for two reasons: (1) allow the individual to first express feelings via drawings, before writing about it, and (2) make it visible about how the group is feeling before entering the main activity.<\/p>\n

4. The Peaks and Valleys timeline (Retrospective activity)<\/a><\/h2>\n

The Peaks and Valleys timeline provides a simple visual language for sharing individual\u2019s views on the ups and downs for a given timeline. It is an effective way for a large group to visualize and uncover events and its interconnections. At the end of this activity the whole group will have a view of several Peaks and valley timelines. It is a good activity for getting the participants to open up for further conversation.<\/p>\n

Below is a sample result for this activity.<\/p>\n

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5. FLAP retrospective (Retrospective activity)<\/a><\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s use the following quadrants for self-reflection and for sharing with each other.<\/p>\n