That Guy - This Guy - an agile retrospective method

This morning we tried something new during our biweekly retrospective. The method I used was based on "That Guy - This Guy", from the book "Fun Retrospectives, by Paulo Caroli and Taina Caetano, but with a twist.

Let me describe the method in some detail before explaining my expansion.
Before starting and welcoming the participants ( I think there were about 7 of us), I drew this illustration on the whiteboard.


I explained:
"Try to recall co-workers from past teams - NOT your current team. Picture in your mind two of them. 'That guy' was terrible. The instant you get the message that you will be in the same team again as he she, you start having nightmares, you start screaming about jumping from the roof or you decide to solicit at a competitor. Instead, 'This Guy' rocks. The instant you hear you will be in the same team again, you start thinking about throwing a party, and phantasize about a promotion."
"I request you to write notes about the qualities of such a person. As for 'That Guy', plz don't mention any names. Not even a hint. And what I said about Guys, also applies to Gals."
When everyone had written their sticky notes, they put them on the blackboard. We discussed them and grouped them.
All sticky items had, on my request, been put above the dotted line.

The second phase I appended as the original method, in my humble opinion, lacked action items. I presented two options to the group, and later realized there was a third.
1. Choose one of the properties listed under "That Guy" or under "This Guy", on which you want to work during the next sprint. Note it in your agenda for reference during our next retrospective in 2 weeks.
2. Choose one of the properties listed under "That Guy" or under "This Guy", on which you want to work during the next sprint, and stick it on the board, thus sharing it with the rest of the team.
The first option is very safe. Some participants preferred the first, safe option. The team deliberated about which of the two options, and finally choose the second option.

Afterwards, I realized there was a third option:
3. Choose a teammate, and let him/her indicate what (s)he sees as a weak point which you might like to work on. Note that this remark is intended as a gift, not as a criticism.
If you want to present the third option, you should realize that this may be sensitive. Teammates might feel a remark as criticism. It takes a lot of courage to choose this item. It may easily be (mis)used by team mates to finally throw out irritation which has built up in the team over weeks or months. If you are not confident about your skills as an agile coach to handle such a situation, simply don’t present the third option. The intention of the third option is to give your teammate a gift: give them your insight on what aspect of his behaviour your teammate might grow most or best.

Agile voting

Of course you want consensus. But building consensus takes time, but sometimes consensus is hard to obtain. Sometimes you don’t have the time to talk on and on, or everybody is bored. Sometimes we need to vote.

Here is a one pager with ways to vote.

Three dots
Execution:
Give every participant 3 dots. These dots may be post-its, or coins, but are usually made with a highlighter
Every participant distributes his/her dots among the options: one for three different options, all three dots for one option, as the voter sees fit.
The option with most dots is chosen (or top 2, or top-3)
You can vary the number of dots as you see fit.

Fist of five
Every participant is asked to raise his/her fist in the air.
Vote leader mentions option and counts from 5 to 0. On 0, every participant raises 1 to 5 fingers simultaneously.
Participants raise 1 to 5 fingers.
Note number of votes and continue with next option.

Roman vote
Everybody votes at the same time in the way on an option in the way that the roman emperors decided on the fate of a defeated gladiator in the arena: thumb up or thumb down. Keep track of the number of thumbs up/down and choose after all options have been voted on.

Planningspoker
List all options.
Hand every participant as many cards from a set of planning poker cards as there are options. Thus, if there are 5 options, each participant gets the cards 0, ½, 1, 2 and 3.
Participants distribute their cards over the options, one card per option.
Item(s) with highest score(s) is(are) elected.

You can find references to the methods described above at the end of this post. Here are two new methods, which I intend to try out in the near future.

Put your money where your mouth is!
Prepare by making small bags with 1 x 50 cent, 2 x 20 cent and 1 x 10 cent
Hand one bag to each participant
Participants distribute their coins over the options, taking turns. Optionally, they may explain to their team mates why they vote as they do.
Option with most money is valued highest.

Race
Prepare a sheet with 4 lanes consisting of up to 12 squares each. Make one marker for every option, mark it with a short one word name.
Hand every participant the cards 0, 1, 2, 3, and 5 from a set of planning poker cards.
Participants take turns to move the markers to the finish by playing one of their cards and moving the marker the number of indicated squares.
Voting ends at the end of the round in which the first item crosses the finish line.
Two or more items may cross the finish in the same round, furthest option wins.

References:
http://www.innolution.com/resources/glossary/dot-voting - dot voting
http://agileforall.com/learning-with-fist-of-five-voting/ - fist of five
https://plans-for-retrospectives.com/en/?id=99 – planning poker voting
http://www.wall-skills.com – roman voting

The story of a feature

In their book “Fun retrospectives”, Paulo Caroli and Taina Caetano describe an activity “The story of a story”. Last Monday, we used this format to analyze why we had not finished any activity for the feature which we had assigned the highest priority during our planning session.

Different resources on the web distinguish different phases or steps that apply to a good retrospective. I like to group them as:

The activities we performed in our session are:
1. Scrummaster draws the timeline
2. Srummaster explains the technique to be used
3. Scrummaster announces of the scope (what happened during the sprint that influenced not completing these activities)
4. Participants write down post-its with relevant events
5. Participants stick their notes on the relevant place in the timeline
6. Participants explain their notes for the group.
7. Group discusses the notes
8. Group formulates lessons / improvement opportunities / action items

The steps 1-3 belong to the “set the stage” phase. Steps 4 and 5 collect the data, step 6 analyzes the data while step 7 and 8 represent the last two phases. As always, formulating action items was the hardest part of a retrospective.

Example of timeline:

The result was that we had a pretty clear picture of what went well and what went wrong.

Sources:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620912(v=vs.120).aspx
https://plans-for-retrospectives.com/en/?id=106-35-95-73-101

Scope of retrospective

Just as planning encompasses all aspects of the sprint, the retrospective covers everything that is part of the sprint.

Often people tend to look at what went well or what went wrong during sprint execution. Why did we get stuck so long at getting that new tool up and running on Jimmy’s pc? How could it happen that we only discovered that team Jay had moved their user story, on which we depend, near the end of the sprint? There is nothing wrong with questions like these. But we may be inclined to overlook that we may also want to evaluate what we may learn during refinement and planning. Even the way we hold our retrospectives may be part of the retrospective!