Conduct Your Retrospective with Leankit

11 shamrocks this sprint!

We have chosen to conduct retrospectives on Wednesdays. Reasons for doing this include:

• To reduce the pressure of cramming work (and ultimately deployments) at the end of a work week then subsequently going into a short or no-staffed weekend with reduced ability to perform break/fix
• Sprint overruns don’t bleed into personal weekends, but rather into cushy Thursdays
• Friday retrospectives frequently fall on holidays or employees’ long weekend vacations

1. Grooming the backlog (Tuesdays):
1. Starting on Tuesday or earlier, take a look at the entire Leankit board and assess a) what is stalled, b) what can be deleted, c) what needs to be promoted from the backlog into the sprint cycle. Taking a holistic view of the entire board (not just the backlog) will enable you to know which cards to promote into the sprint cycle.
2. Here are some examples for actions to take while grooming:
1. Stalled card: You can find stalled cards by filtering on “Staleness”. IM the cardholder or put an @mention in the card asking if they are blocked. If blocked, mark the card as such. Call out larger cards that are stalled and see if they can be decomposed so that points flow across the board faster. (These cards would be found most frequently in the active sprint lanes).
2. Irrelevant card: Scope that has been incidentally completed by another card, is a duplicate, or is no longer relevant to the product. Make sure the card isn’t needed if it has an owner and ensure no information is lost in the comments or in the description of the card. (These cards would be found most frequently in the backlog).
3. Descope card: In some cases there has been substantial effort put toward completion of a card and it is functional enough for completion. In this case it makes sense to modify and descope the card description then move it to Done or Archive. This helps flow work across the board so that continued review can be made of the work in progress. Don’t be afraid to descope to move it to a complete lane, then make a new card with the remaining scope! (These cards would be found most frequently in the active sprint lanes).
4. Promote card from the backlog: Get a sense from your leave calendar as to who will be around for the next sprint and what resources will be available, then begin to promote the Most Viable Product (MVP) cards into your “Ready for Work” lane.
2. Grooming the board (Most importantly Tuesdays, but can be ongoing):
1. Ensure all cards that are on the board have points assigned to them
2. Ensure all cards have parent cards assigned (this only applies when you have a hierarchical Kanban structure):
1. 

   Go to Filters

2. Press the Hide button
3. Press “Reset All”
4. Under Parent Cards, press “Hide All”
5. Click on the “Not Assigned” card
6. Whatever is not assigned will show, open the card and assign the card to a parent project
3. (Anytime Tuesday) Send an email out to the team letting them know to finish up their cards by 9AM Wednesday. This helps shake the trees, and will ensure proper analytics gathering.
3. (Anytime prior to retrospective) Prepare Retrospective Agenda
1. Keep an ongoing agenda locatable in a common Wiki or Google Drive
2. Include bulleted items such as a link to the Efficiency Chart (more on that below), scrummaster comments, and any improvements in the process you’d like to suggest. It may be helpful to add the questions:
1. What worked well?
2. What isn’t working well that we should stop?
3. What should we start doing?
4. Preparing metrics
1. About an hour prior to convening the retrospective, send a note to the team letting them know you’re pulling metrics. This let’s them know that all activity on the board as of that moment won’t be reflected in your data.
2. Create another ongoing Wiki or Google document that displays your weekly efficiency charts. Make a link to this from your Retrospective Agenda.  
1. The document should have the following bullets:
• Points Completed for This Sprint:
• Details:
• Outlook:
• Estimate for Points Completed Next Sprint:
• Screenshot of efficiency chart
3. Copy the previous week’s information and paste at the top of the document
4. Update the date and remove all previous week’s information (except bullet descriptions ie. “Points Completed for This Sprint:”
5. Insert a fresh screenshot of the efficiency chart:
1. Click on Board Analytics>Efficiency
   
2. Manually resize your browser screen so the graph will fit on the Wiki or Google Doc once you take a screenshot (trust me, this helps)
3. Click on the “By Queue Size” Tab
   
4. Scroll down and ensure the “Calculate Based on Card Size” button is checked

   
5. Scroll all the way to the bottom and deselect all lanes except “Done Pending Retrospective”, and “Done, No Retrospective Needed”

   
6. Set the START and END dates. The dates should span ~3 months worth of time. The END date should be the date you conduct the retrospective

   
7. Press the “Refresh Data*” button
8. Scroll back up to the top and deselect everything except for “Completed”

   
9. Hover your mouse over the right-most part of the graph so that “Completed:x” and Date show.
10. Take a screenshot (MacOS: cmd+shift+4). You want to capture all the dates at the bottom, title of the chart, and the vertical title of “Queue Size/Day” on the left hand side. Your finished screenshot should look similar to below:

    
6. Copy/Paste your screenshot under the “Estimate for Points Completed Next Sprint:” bulletpoint
7. Enter the points value on the top bullet: “Points Completed for This Sprint:”
8. For “Details:” Do an analysis on points completed. Were there resources out of pocket, allocated to other projects, etc.
9. For “Outlook:” take a look at the leave calendar and get a sense for what resources will be available for the sprint
10. For “Estimate for Points Completed Next Sprint:”
1. Take account of how much work is in the home stretch of the board (any card from the Doing lane and to the right)
2. Consider how many resources will be available
3. Consider your average points completed per day
• Use the Cumulative Flow/burn-up chart to determine the average points completed per day (more on this in a later blog)
4. Put a realistic value in your bullet point once you given it some thought
• Have fun with this and encourage the team to get involved with this estimate. It’s not an exact science or formula, but the more you practice estimation the more precise you’ll become!
5. Start your retrospective:
1. Use Google Hangouts or some other form of screensharing + videoconferencing solution for remote participation
6. Clear cards out of your “Done” lane:
1. We’ve created a sublane named “Done, No Retrospective Needed”. This is for routine tasks that don’t warrant any review or discussion. Move these cards into “Archive”.
2. Another sublane we’ve created is named “Purgatory”. This is for completed cards that do warrant a review and discussion however the team member isn’t available for the retrospective. Move any cards for those who are not in attendance down to “Purgatory”.
3. Call on team members to walk through their cards that are in “Done, Pending Retrospective”. It’s best to group team members with their cards so you’re not jumping around a lot. Move the card to Archive when they’re done reviewing the work.
4. Prompt for screensharing and questions. This is an opportunity for the team to load balance and reduce single points of failure (SPOFs).