Agile Retrospectives can be used to deal with problems in teams, at a project or product level, or those related to the collaboration between the team and stakeholders. But you need a different approach compared to team level retrospectives to do organizational-wide improvement. This session shows how to use agile retrospectives to reveal and solve systemic organizational problems and to increase the company’s agility It explores different approaches, formats, and techniques for agile retrospectives that are done beyond the development team. Extended Abstract Nowadays many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing their time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value to customers and stakeholders, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systemic organizational problems. Agile Retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, I will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations. Note: Some might call the above approach scaling retrospectives. If that goes towards imposing how teams do retrospectives with some kind of framework, then I believe it doesn’t work. Increasing agility with retrospectives is about creating an environment where teams not only focus on their own improvement needs but also on the company as a whole, and get support from management when improvements go over their team borders or outside their autonomy.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospectives To The Next Level:
Organizational Agility
OOP Munich, Feb 3-7, 2020
Ben Linders

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Ben Linders Consulting
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous improvement
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
BenLinders.com
Books: Valuable Agile Retrospectives Problem? What Problem?
What Drives Quality Self-assessments Continuous Improvement
Games: Agile Self-assessment Game Retrospectives Bingo Impediments
Quality Coaching Cards Agile Testing Cards

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Retrospectives in Teams
 Reflect and learn
 Self-organize
 Engage & empower
 Safety
 Proximity

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Involve stakeholder in retrospective
 Busy – will they join the retro?
 Might not see the need/benefits
 Communication challenges
Prerequisites:
 Trust & safety
 Good relationship

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Improvement at higher level
 Systemic, Complex Problems
 Hard to oversee & understand
 Stakeholders with Different Goals
 Cultural & Organizational Barriers
Retrospectives or other techniques

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Retrospectives with Stakeholders
 Invite all involved
 Problems relevant for all
 Suitable exercise/format
 Shared understanding
 Ownership of actions
Meeting Atmosphere
 Everyone feels welcome
 Safe to speak up
 No blaming & complaining
 Guiding toward results

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Systems Thinking
Holistic view
 Know the purpose
 Visualize the system
 Understand behavior
 Probe-sense-respond

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Agility or
improving
shouldn’t be
your goal
It’s a means to
an end

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Visualization
 Kanban board (JP book)
 Constellation (board meeting)
 Value Stream (customization)
Explore, discuss, share, learn
Exercises Book

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Root cause analysis
Analyze a problem
to determine causes
that made it
happen, to define
actions to prevent
similar problems
from happening
 Real Problem
 Significant Damage
 Sponsor pays:
– investigation and
– preventive actions
Success Factors RCA
“We do not want such a problem to happen again!”

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Finding Root Causes
 Multiple causes
 Relationships
 Safety (training)
Challenges
• Opinion or fact
• Uniqueness
• Prevent or mitigate

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Agile Self-assessments
Self-assess to improve
 Discuss & Learn
 Engage & Involve
 Health check
 Take action
Agile journey
Checklists Game

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Impediments & Blockers
 Solve first, learn later
 Collect and organize
 Analyze to understand
 What and why, not who
Fail fast -> Learn fast
 Don’t shoot the messenger
 Ignoring doesn’t make
problems go away

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Large-scale retrospectives
Project Product Organization
Release Delivery Quarterly
Collaboration Arch, Tech Debt Structure/culture
Dev, Ops, & Teams & Departments &
Stakeholders Arch / POs & PMs Managers
Timeline Value Stream Map Open Space
Large Sailboat Mad Sad Glad Self-assessment

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Case: Bus–Dev–Ops Retrospective
Distributed business, develop & operations –> Agile team
• Physical and social distance
• Distributed decisions
• Timeline retrospectives on release
– Reconstruct what happened
– How people felt about it
– Improve decision making

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Organizational-wide Collaboration

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Agile Retrospectives Myths
 Invented by agile/Scrum
 Only for teams
 One format fits all
 Learn from mistakes
 Lead by Scrum master
 More actions is better

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Prime Directive
“Regardless 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.”
Project Retrospectives – A handbook for Team Reviews
Create an Open Culture
where people Speak Up
with Respect for each other
to Learn and Improve

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Independent Facilitator
 Process
 Effectiveness
 Atmosphere
 No personal agenda
 Not involved in topic

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Vital Few Actions
 Small Actions
 Frequent Change
 Focus on Value
 Stop Starting,
Start Finishing
Vital Few Actions

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Imposing doesn’t work

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Engage and empower
Retrospectives Exercises Toolbox

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Management support for retrospectives
• Encourage people do retrospectives
• Don’t attend, unless explicitly invited
• Respect the “Vegas Rule”
• Craft and communicate a vision
• Offer help, let team self-organize
• Listen to understand, don’t judge
Role of Managers in Agile Retrospectives

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Agile journey of learning
 What hinders us to reach our goals?
 What helps us to take the next step?
 What are the risks & opportunities?
 What to pack for our agile journey?
 What shall we leave behind?
Backpacking Retrospective

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Coaching Agile
 People coach each other
 Culture of coaching – all levels
 Exchange coaching experiences
 JIT & on-the-job coaching
 Coach by just being there
Agile needs coaching
Not about coaches; coaching and coachees matters!

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Enable organization for improvement
 Establish a culture of learning
 Drive out fear and blaming
 Do improvements at all levels

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Key Takeaways
• Use retrospectives to address systemic issues and do
organizational-wide improvement
• Think about the exercises used in your retrospectives
and have a strong independent retrospective facilitator
• Don't impose change on people, engage and empower
people with self-assessments and gamification

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Questions?Questions?
Ben Linders
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.cominfo@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvieswww.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

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Bonus: Effective Retrospectives
 Why over how
 Good facilitation
 Effective exercises
 Frequent, small steps
 Vital few actions