The First Retrospective

Last week I spent Thursday morning facilitating a project Retrospective for a local development group who'd never held a Retro before. As part of my engagement, I was also asked to do some "training the trainers" in the sense of working with a couple of people there who were interested in taking on the facilitation role in the future. The thinking on the part of the executive sponsor was that they wanted to bring an expert in for an early Retrospective (or more) but not be reliant on him forever, which is a sentiment that I totally agree with and was happy to support.

The preparation for the session started several days beforehand, as I e-mailed questions to the sponsor and also had a phone conversation with him. I'd sketched out a possible structure for the Retro prior to that, and then the two of us hammered out the final details during that call. One of the most important factors we talked about was duration, which ultimately ended up being 2.5 hours. I would have loved to have scheduled it for longer since it was covering an entire 6- or 7-month project. However, the flip side of the coin was that this was going to be everyone's first Retro, and there was concern that being subjected to a full-day session first time out would be too much, too soon. That led to the decision for a meeting running from 8:30 to 11:00 a.m.

When I got on-site Thursday morning, I met with the future-facilitators for an hour and described what would be happening. The three of us got the room ready by putting up some large sticky notes (a mostly-blank timeline, ground rules and the agenda) and I provided a few thoughts on what I believe the facilitator's role to entail:

• keeping the group focused on events and learning, not on people and blaming
• warming up 'cold' rooms and cooling down 'hot' ones
• nipping any personal attacks in the bud
• avoiding ruts in the proceedings by keeping things moving forward
• making each of the attendees feel comfortable with the process itself

I'd planned a warm-up activity that went well (got people talking, generated some light-hearted laughter, felt like fun) and then we drove headfirst into the agenda.

Most of the attendees were slow to open up very much, as you'd expect from people in their first Retrospective. Nothing too contentious came out until more than halfway through, and even then it was offered up fairly tentatively. By the 2.5-hour mark, though, things were getting much more interesting... just as time was up! As one of the trainee facilitators pointed out, it was all we could do to get several of the attendees out of the room even half an hour after it was over! And these were very busy folks, some of whom were missing other commitments in order to stay a little later and chat with us about what they`d just gone through. That sort of thing is really rewarding to see!

The results of the 1-page survey that I handed out at the end were very positive (scores averaged between 8.2 and 9.0 out of 10). In our 1-hour debrief after the session (half of which was chewed up by the hanger-on-ers!), the two trainees did a great job cleaning up the room (while I was waylaid with questions) and then talked about how interesting it had been for them. They were concerned about being able to do what I had done, but I assured them it was easier than it looked! In fact, the toughest part for me was that I was on my feet for nearly the entire two and a half hours, an amount of standing well beyond anything that I've done in the past several months. I'd had the presence of mind to bring a big bottle of water with me so I wouldn't get parched, and yet I didn't think to sit down for more than about 2 minutes over the course of the meeting!

I don't know yet whether or not I'll be invited back for additional work, but this first contract was very enjoyable, indeed. The participants were committed to the process and willing to open up in front of each other and a stranger, and you can't ask much more than that!