retrospectives

Scrum team member fixing a bicycle 3 Common Scrum Anti-Patterns and How to Fix Them

For a Scrum team to operate successfully, the entire team must honor the Scrum values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. But it's easy to fall into practices that can erode trust and collaboration. Here are three common anti-patterns that emerge in Scrum, as well as the solutions to overcome them.

Owen Gotimer's picture
Owen Gotimer
Team member pointing a finger to blame someone Is Your Culture about Responsibility or Blame?

When things go wrong, it can be helpful to understand what happened and who was involved. However, all too often organizations (and the managers within) confuse responsibility with assigning blame. The former is essential for improvement. The latter works against an effective, collaborative, productive culture.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Scrum team having a productive retrospective Are Your Retrospectives Adding Value to Your Scrum Team?

Sprint retrospectives are often skipped, compressed, or organized in a way that doesn't provide good feedback. This is unfortunate, as a well-planned retrospective is a great way to improve how you work. Good retrospectives enable engagement and safety, distill and prioritize ideas, and create concrete action items.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Two agile team members exchanging feedback in a retrospective 6 Ways to Share Negative Feedback in a Retrospective

Negative feedback has the greatest potential to help people change in areas that can have a lasting impact. But sharing negative experiences and criticism can often be a challenge and may cause more harm than good. Here are six tips for sharing negative experiences effectively and building trust along the way.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch
Signs pointing toward success one way and failure the other What You Can Learn from Failure—and from Success

Success and failure teach different lessons. Lessons from failure tend to revolve around what not to do next time around, whereas lessons from success focus on what you can do again, perhaps even better. But whether you experience success or failure, the key is to take the time to learn from what happened.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Continuous improvement Driving Continuous Improvement to the Entire Organization

In traditional agile approaches, retrospectives are valuable to team improvement. However, when teams encounter organizational issues beyond their control, such as project structure, interorganizational communication, or resources, it's more difficult. Here's how to expand continuous improvement to the whole company.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch
Someone about to plunge into water Catch Small Failures Early with Agile Practices

Agile is designed to keep failures small and manageable. It’s essential to be able to talk about small failures and ways to improve during the retrospective so that the teams can advance their agile practices. If your teams can’t talk about their small failures openly, there is a great risk of bigger troubles soon.

Ryan Ripley's picture
Ryan Ripley
Start the New Year with a Retrospective

This new year, instead of a resolution, consider a retrospective. Rather than just setting one large goal for yourself, you review what you've been doing, what's been working and what hasn't, what you want to accomplish, and what small steps you can take every day to reach your objective.

Johanna Rothman's picture
Johanna Rothman