### 5.5.2 Structure of an Iteration Retrospective The key goal of an Iteration Retrospective is helping teams to improve continuously. In order to make that happen, one needs to create an environment where all the Agile Team Members (ATeM) feel safe and comfortable sharing concrete data, identifying problems and improvement opportunities and establishing action plans. This environment must be created during every Iteration Retrospective and to enable that, a rigorous but flexible structure is required. Rigorous because it should always follow a set of steps and flexible to enable adjusting the contents of each step without changing its purpose. More than just identifying what went well, what needs improvement and what needs to stop being done, PM2-Agile proposes a more agnostic structure, based on the following steps: - **Welcome** – Establish an environment where everyone feels encouraged and comfortable participating and sharing opinions. - **Collect Hard Data** – Collect all relevant data to help creating a common picture of the reality the team wants to focus on. This can include events, metrics, etc. - **Understand Data and Generate Ideas** – Understand root causes of the problems and patterns of success. Generate possible solutions with several alternative scenarios. - **Prioritise and Choose** – Because usually it’s not possible to implement all the proposals, the team needs to prioritise and decide which ones to take onboard. - **Closing** – End the ceremony and make sure to keep track of all the learnings. The following sections describe a bit more in detail each of these steps. #### 5.5.2.1 Welcome Although this step may sound a bit simple and not as relevant as the other ones, the fact is that this is the most important step to ensure a successful retrospective. Every time the Agile Team Members (ATeM) get together to discuss topics that include their individual performance, it’s very important that they feel comfortable, and they know that their time will be well spent. The first key point is to make sure everyone feels that their opinion counts and as such, they will not have a problem sharing it. As an excellent and simple exercise, the Team Coordinator (TeCo) can ask each Agile Team Member (ATeM) to point out, using one sentence, how they felt during the iteration or what do they expect from the Iteration Retrospective. By doing this, the Team Coordinator (TeCo) makes it clear that she expects everyone to talk. When this exercise is not done or people are allowed to remain silent, it means that it’s ok for them to keep silent for the rest of the retrospective. The Team Coordinator (TeCo) can use other activities to achieve this same goal. After this warm-up, the Team Coordinator (TeCo) must explain the approach to the participants. What are the steps, the corresponding activities and what is expected from each. Finally, she must communicate the timebox for the ceremony. The last point to consider in this step is to properly define the rules of the ceremony. These are the rules that will create the environment that allows the Agile Team Members (ATeM) to feel comfortable having difficult conversations. In other words, to define the accepted behaviours during the ceremony. If the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) already has working agreements, they should be used. After all, the same principles apply to the Iteration Retrospective. If not, they should create them right now. This will take some time from this particular Iteration Retrospective but will be very useful for the following ones. The team is now ready to proceed to the next step. #### 5.5.2.2 Collect Hard Data With the whole Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) ready to start, it’s time to collect all the data that will be analysed. The goal of this approach is to ensure that all Agile Team Members (ATeM) are focused and share the same vision of the reality. Otherwise, each one will have their opinions based on their own vision of the data they want to analyse. As a starting point, the Team Coordinator (TeCo) should help the rest of the Agile Team Members (ATeM) collecting all the hard data related with events, metrics, completed work items, etc. Events may include all kinds of moments that were somehow relevant to any of the Agile Team Members (ATeM), like meetings, important decisions, celebrations, etc. Metrics can include burnup and burndown charts, velocity charts, percentage of broken builds, percentage of test coverage, etc. The more data the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) puts together, the easier will be to have a common view of the reality. Please note that although the Team Coordinator (TeCo) can help with tasks, it’s always the Agile Team Members (ATeM) who decide which data they want to use. PM2-Agile suggests that the Team Coordinator (TeCo) and the rest of the Agile Team Members (ATeM) have this hard data visible, either organised by technical area, team area, chronologically in a timeline, etc. This approach will make it easier to visualise everything and make connections between the data, establish patterns, etc. There’s a second and very important aspect that cannot be left unattended by the Agile Team Members (ATeM) when analysing the data. It has to do with people’s feelings. Feelings help understanding what is important to each Agile Team Member (ATeM) and how they felt in certain moments. By connecting the feelings to a set of data, a pattern, etc, it will become much easier to understand it. This may be finding the root cause of a problem, understanding a pattern, etc. This is a very important aspect as it will be a key enabler for the next step. #### 5.5.2.3 Understand Data and Generate Ideas It’s very important to have a set of hard data that can be analysed under a unique perspective by the several Agile Team Members (ATeM). However, having data is not enough, since data needs to have a meaning. That’s when the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) should move to the next step. This third step focus on evaluating and understanding the data and generate ideas that will allow them to solve some of the problems identified, understand patterns, improve other aspects, etc. When a team implements a solution as an answer to a problem without considering other alternatives, usually the final result is not the best. For that reason, understanding the hard data and generating ideas plays a fundamental role, since this is what will allow the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) to improve its performance. #### 5.5.2.4 Prioritise and Choose By this time, the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) should have a set of actions regarding possible improvements to implement. This is the right moment to prioritise and choose the ones the team wants to work on during the next iteration (or release). The Team Coordinator (TeCo) should guide the team towards the actions that will clearly bring the best benefits and which they can commit to. Another important aspect is the way in which the actions chosen by the team will be planned in terms of work. To ensure that those actions are always visible and treated as any other item, PM2-Agile recommends including them in the Work Items List (WIL). As a last point to consider in this step, it’s important to ensure that for each of the work items planned (either during the Iteration Retrospective or during the Iteration Planning), Agile Team Members (ATeM) commit to execute all the required tasks. When a task is assigned to the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT) and not to an Agile Team Member (ATeM), it ends up not being done. #### 5.5.2.5 Closing An Iteration Retrospective can be very demanding from a psychologic point of view. As such, and just like the team takes a few minutes to prepare itself for the meeting, it should also take a few minutes to ensure a proper meeting closure. The first aspect the Team Coordinator (TeCo) should focus on is to guarantee a decisive end. She must not allow pending topics and conversations to progress to this stage. It’s during this stage that the team decides how they will capture everything they discussed and learnt. Apart from what is registered in the Work Items List (WIL), there are several other topics whose information must be collected and stored. Boards, photos, printing digital images, etc. All this knowledge belongs to the Agile Team Members (ATeM) and not to the Team Coordinator (TeCo). They need to own it and store it. Finally, the Team Coordinator must close the ceremony, acknowledging all the work made by the Agile Project Core Team (A-PCT), not only during the Iteration Retrospective but also throughout the entire Iteration. The Team Coordinator (TeCo) may also want to conduct a quick Inspect and Adapt towards the Retrospective to check which points can be improved.