Future Retro Box
We have noticed on our current project that during retrospectives people usually raise good and bad things from the last days only. At the moment we have a 3 weeks iteration and it’s hard to remember what happened on the first days. I have already used from 1 to 4 weeks iteration and each project has its own reasons for choosing this length. To help the team improve around things that happened during the whole iteration, we have a box called the Future Retro Box, where people can all keep adding notes throughout the iteration.
The reason why the box is called Future is because it will be opened during the next retrospective. The items inside the box will bootstrap the retro wall when people can add other ones.
Make sure the box is in a visible point of the work environment.
Another option would be to have an on going retrospective wall, as suggested by my friend Lachlan. However, this might work better for a co-located team, we are distributed. We tried using a wiki for that… It didn’t work… No one adds comments to the wiki… Why? Perhaps the wiki is a Refrigerator as opposed to a Radiator. The box has been working fine so far. The notes are not visible, but the box itself is.
I like this idea. My only concern is that you’re waiting until the retrospective to deal with the items.
I recently found out that a team of TW-ers of the India offices (Anand A. Chirag, Dhaval and Anay)have developed a tool for distributed retrospectives. Unlike Cardmeeting.com, you don’t need to sign up for a meeting, you just create a new retro and send the link to all team members and people can start adding stickies.
Here is the link:http://retro.play.railsplayground.net
You can choose what retro format you want to use, you can vote and the feature to club stickies in under construction.
I have used it a few times now and it works well.
I like the golden box though….:-)
Hi Fabio, I noticed the same thing (during retrospectives people usually raise good and bad things from the last days only).
So I used to write post-it day-by-day for me but I was still thinking how to have this practices at team level. Think that Future Retro Box could be one good idea!