I have been constantly amazed how useful project retrospectives are on agile teams. Far from being a technical problem, developing software using an Agile approach is very much about the team, the people on the team and most of all, how they communicate with each other. I have seen first hand what a difference holding retrospectives can make, and published my experiences in the paper, "XP - Call in the Social Workers".
In a similar vein, while working at Connextra on a long standing XP team, I began to notice how a superbly efficient team can become quite distressed in its success at efficiently delivering software iteration after iteration. After thinking about this in the pub, I jotted down some ideas and then collaborated with my co-workers to introduce a scheme to build innovation into our iterations. Originally I had intended the idea to be called, Green Cards, becuase we happened to have a stack of green index cards that I felt could be used for these episodes of innovation, however my colleagues rightfully steared us to use the better title of: "Innovation and Sustainability with Gold Cards".
More recently, I have written about my latest experiences using retrospectives with Agile teams in a web article on Agile Retrospectives in Objective Magazine.
And Futurespectives...
This exercise is related to the “TimeLine” exercise described by Norm Kerth, however I was helped to develop it by attendees of the “Retrospective Facilitators Gathering – 2005”, with inspiration from “Giving an A" (described to me by Jean Tabaka), and Luke Hohmann’s “Remember the Future”.
Participants are asked to imagine that they have stepped into a time machine and have teleported to a time just after the completion of their project (which in reality is just starting). As the project was a success, its sponsors are keen to do a project retrospective (and so we are examining the future past).
As we know the project was a success, there are many successful events which should be recorded on the timeline (as green post-its); however there may also have been some things that potentially didn’t go well (recorded as red post-its). Given that we know that the team always managed to overcome any difficulties –problematic events should always be followed by amazingly successful actions that overcame the difficulty (and the post-its on the timeline should demonstrate this with green ones following any red).
Once the future timeline has been created, participants are then asked to step back and mine it in the way similar to a normal timeline, “what went well”, “what can we do differently” and finally what actions should we take for the upcoming project.
Hohmann describes this as a mind trick that helps people overcome blockages that are limiting them from seeing potential solutions.
My experiments with this exercise have been very well recieved, and some teams have revisted their Futurespective time lines 6 months after they were created to see how well they have influenced their future. They were quite amazed at how much they could...
Spookily, when contemplating doing a round of internal Futurespectives at ThoughtWorks, a colleague of mine introduced me to his Talking Yoda, and explained that if I was thinking about doing something different I should ask Yoda himself... but not out loud he said, as I began to ask my question.
So I thought-asked yoda -
"Should I run some futurespectives before the end of the year" to which Yoda replied:
'Thinking about the future disturbs the past it does...'
And so I decided to hold them... disturbance can be good.