Metaphors from our day-to-day life can throw new perspectives when juxtaposed with professional or personal experiences. What seemingly looks like a mundane chore can give great insights with interesting and innovative improvisations. The author, a committed technologist, makes this brave and successful attempt to explain retrospectives using contexts from day-to-day life with suitable graphic representations for ease of understanding. The book focuses on 'retrospectives' as a platform for teams as well as individuals to reflect and improve. She strongly advocates that, regardless of the industry, teams need to have an experimental mindset to continuously learn and adapt. Thus, reflecting on diversified areas such as work-life balance, goals, team collaboration, product development, process, technology, delivery, or targets is an ongoing process that happens either explicitly or implicitly. The book highlights the need for teams and individuals to come out of their comfort zones and think out-of-the box, while staying in sync with their individual and organization's goals. Illustrations shown in the book can be customized according to organizational or individual aspirations.

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only held at the end of the project—too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today. Now Esther and Diana show you the tools, tricks and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You’ll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes and how to scale these techniques up. You’ll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project—not just at the end. This book will help you: Design and run effective retrospectives Learn how to find and fix problems Find and reinforce team strengths Address people issues as well as technological Use tools and recipes proven in the real world With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.

Improve Every Retrospective! Real Solutions for Every Team Leader, Facilitator, and Participant “. . . Aino has shared a robust, curated list of antipatterns and how to avoid them. . . . And she has shared so much more than tips and techniques. You will find a gold mine--with precious nuggets, including her personal experiences, effective facilitation resources, and pointers for extracting yourself and your team when you're stuck.” --From the Foreword by Diana Larsen, co-author, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great Retrospectives are indispensable for continuous learning and improvement in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other contexts, but most of us have suffered through at least one retrospective that was a waste of time, or worse. Now, leading agile coach Aino Vonge Corry identifies 24 reasons that retrospectives fail and shows how to overcome each of them. Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Retrospectives Antipatterns introduces antipatterns related to structure, planning, people, distributed teams, and more. Corry shares traps she's encountered and mistakes she's made over more than a decade of leading retrospectives and then presents proven solutions. With her insights and guidance, you can run enjoyable retrospectives that deliver concrete improvements and real value--or at the very least recognize when you are making the same mistake as the author! Create a common language, actionable solutions, and proven plans for solving the retrospective problems you'll encounter most often Recognize symptoms, assess tradeoffs, and refactor your current situation into something better Plan more effectively: decide who should attend and facilitate, when to schedule your retrospective, and how much time to set aside Handle “people” problems: deal with negativity, silence, distrust, disillusionment, loudmouths, and cultural differences Facilitate better “virtual” retrospectives, with tips for online retrospectives included in each antipattern Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

This is the digital copy of the printed booik (Copyright © 2001). With detailed scenarios, imaginative illustrations, and step-by-step instructions, consultant and speaker Norman L. Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance. Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts. For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive: Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.

Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives helps you and your teams to do retrospectives effectively and efficiently. It's a toolbox with many exercises for facilitating retrospectives, supported with the "what" and "why" of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they bring, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. If you are a Scrum master, agile coach, project manager, product manager or facilitator then this book helps you to discover and apply new ways to do Valuable Agile Retrospectives with your teams. With plenty of exercises you can develop your own personal Retrospectives Toolbox to become more proficient in doing retrospectives and get more out of them.

Change is difficult but essential—Esther Derby offers seven guidelines for change by attraction, an approach that draws people into the process so that instead of resisting change, they embrace it. Even if you don't have change management in your job description, your job involves change. Change is a given as modern organizations respond to market and technology advances, make improvements, and evolve practices to meet new challenges. This is not a simple process on any level. Often, there is no indisputable right answer, and responding requires trial and error, learning and unlearning. Whatever you choose to do, it will interact with existing policies and structures in unpredictable ways. And there is, quite simply, a natural human resistance to being told to change. Rather than creating more rigorous preconceived plans or imposing change by decree, agile software developer turned organizational change expert Esther Derby offers change by attraction, an approach that is adaptive and responsive and engages people in learning, evolving, and owning the new way. She presents a set of seven heuristics—guides to problem-solving—that empower people to achieve outcomes within broad constraints using their personal ingenuity and creativity. When you work by attraction, you give space and support for people to feel the loss that comes with change and help them see what is valuable about the future you propose. Resistance fades because people feel there is nothing to push against—only something they want to move toward. Derby's approach clears the fog to provide a new way forward that honors people and creates safety for change.

Agile retrospectives help you get to the root of your real problems, so you can solve them quickly and effectively. They're the cornerstone of a successful continuous improvement process, and one of your best tools for triggering positive cultural change. In Improving Agile Retrospectives, leading agile coach/trainer Marc Loeffler combines practical guidance, proven practices, and innovative approaches for maximizing the value of retrospectives for your team--and your entire organization. You can apply his powerful techniques in any project, agile or otherwise. These techniques offer exceptional value wherever continuous improvement is needed: from "lessons-learned" workshops in traditional project management to enterprise-wide change management. Loeffler's detailed, results-focused examples help you recognize and overcome common pitfalls, adapt retrospectives to your unique needs, and consistently achieve tangible results. Throughout, he integrates breakthrough concepts, such as using experimentation and learning from system thinking. He presents small ideas that make a big difference--because they're deeply grounded in real experience. * Learn from failures and successes, and make good things even better * Master facilitation techniques that help you achieve your goals (and have fun doing it) * Prepare your retrospective so it runs smoothly * Practice techniques for generating actionable insights * Keep your retrospectives fresh and interesting * Perform retrospectives that address the entire system, not just your team * Focus on your "better future" with solution-focused retrospectives * Learn how to avoid typical pitfalls when facilitating retrospectives * Lead retrospectives across multiple distributed teams * Use retrospectives to support large-scale change