Format: The Fast and The Furious
Fasten your seatbelt for the Fast and Furious retrospective! During this retrospective, you will not only learn things about the previous sprint, but you might also reveal some things on your colleagues…
The Icebreaker
The icebreaker of this retrospective is aligned with the overall theme of the Fast and Furious. It’s a quick and fun icebreaker that will get people engaged in the session: ask everybody to share a picture of the car that they would drive if they were part of the Fast and Furious. Prepare yourself… some colleagues will not be driving the car that you would expect them to!
The retrospective format
The Fast and Furious retrospective format contains five stages:
- “Fast:” What are things that we did fast and/or efficient in the last sprint?
- “First:” What are things that we did for the first time last sprint (are perhaps we have to keep doing in the next sprints)?
- “Fun:” What are fun things that we experienced in the last sprint?
- “Fed up:” What were boring this in the last sprint, and we didn’t like to do?
- “Furious:” What were annoying this in the last sprint, and we have to get rid off, and make sure we don’t have to do again?
While having the discussion on a topic, always focus on what’s within the control of the team. Don’t focus too much on external people or factors, but mainly on the things that are within the control of the team to identify improvement actions that the team is able to take. You want to have 1 – 2 action items at the end of the retrospective that you can implement in the next iteration(s). Remember: you will not always have big live changing action items in each retrospective. That’s also not the intention. A small action that brings a small improvements is already very good. Try to improve a little each sprint instead of trying to bring big changes at once.
About last retrospective...
A crucial part of the retrospective is to reflect on the outcome of the previous one! Teams often forget to do this, but it is very important as it gives the team the confirmation that the action items are actually important… And that we want to make sure we improve! There is a section on the top of the template where you can refer to the action items of the last retrospective. Go over them, see how you are doing in regards to them, and decide what to do next.
Rate your retro!
At the very end of the retrospective, I ask the team to quickly rate their retrospective with focus on:
- Did we have a good discussion? Did we speak openly, and respect each others opinion?
- Do we have valuable action items? And, are we confident that we will do them in the next sprint?
To continu in the Fast and Furious theme, everybody can rate the retrospective using one of the four cars shown in the template.
Other things about the format
On the very top of the format, you can see 2 elements:
- Action items / experiments: this is the place where you would write down the action items during the retrospective. This makes it easy to summarize them at the end of the session.
- Idea for the next retrospective: I always like to foresee an area where people can give feedback or give input for the next retrospective. This can be feedback on the current format, ideas for a new format, tips, general feedback… Anything that can help us make the next retrospective even better! I would not make it required for people to give input in this, make them feel free to give input when they come up with something.
Download the template (for free)
You can download the Miro template for free below:
If you don’t have a premium version of Miro, you can also download the picture at the top of the screen and create the board in Google Drawings.
Recent Comments