Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient

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

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Retrospectives 101
Chapter 2 Preparing Retrospectives
Chapter 3 The First Retrospective
Chapter 4 The Retrospective Facilitator
Chapter 5 From the Metaphor to the Retrospective
Chapter 6 Systemic Retrospectives
Chapter 7 Solution-Focused Retrospectives
Chapter 8 Distributed Retrospectives
Chapter 9 Alternative Approaches
Chapter 10 Typical Problems and Pitfalls
Chapter 11 Change Management