Category: Uncategorized

My top 3 learnings for running a good retrospective

Featured by xavierfigueras, posted in Uncategorized

As you all know I have been running retrospectives for several years and I can say I had the chance to learn from awesome facilitators during this time. Today I’d like to share with you my top 3 learnings.

Focus on the actions

In the end the success of a retrospective is measured by the quality of the resulting actions. Therefore it makes sense to invest a decent amount of time in discussing them and ensure alignment. A common mistake is to spend way too much time in the problem solving phase, which unavoidably force us to speed up to define the actions.

If in a 1:1 coaching session the recommendation is to invest a 80% of time to discuss issues and 20% to jump to action, in team retrospectives I’d adjust these percentages in the following way:

  • 10% to share the agenda and make sure everyone is present in the meeting (check-in)
  • 60% dedicated to raising problems and discussing them
  • 30% dedicated to action refinement and feedback

In order to get to quality actions I suggest:

  • Less is more: it’s better to leave the room with one good action rather than three regular ones.
  • Do not hesitate using extra frameworks such as effort-value charts.
  • Use the soup retrospective to help the team understand what are the areas where the team can control and the areas where the team can influence.
  • Using the SMART approach (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based) after the voting session.
  • Measure alignment: making sure we all have the same understanding on what should happen.
  • Have a clear DRI (direct responsible individual) over leaving it to the entire team

FOSTER DIVERSITY

A game changer for my retrospectives was to find ways to bring up the best of what’s already in the room. Based on the believe that wisdom lies within the team, it’s on our interest to make sure all ideas blossom. Everyone has great knowledge on how things should look like, however, when we simply ask “what can be improved?” certainly there are many aspects that can be easily left out.

Ways to foster diversity:

  • Show a video that can serve as a metaphor during check-in phase.
  • Draw the latest iteration.
  • Ask open questions related to the vision: what is the best team you’ve ever worked with? what was present there?
  • Run a previous hopes&concerns session.

You can think of it as giving a lantern to the team and ask them to look left, right or in any specific directions before jumping into a broader question.

ENSURE PRESENCE AND CONNECTION

The hybrid format brought up an underlying problem in many meetings and is that easily we lack the team members engagement at some point during the process. As facilitators it’s on our best interest to make sure to reach high levels of participation so that quality discussions happen.

Since it’s very likely that our colleagues have concerns or out of scope thoughts distracting them, it’s a very good idea to do something to help them be present. Here are some possibilities:

  • “Pass the ball” and just share something quick related to the latest iteration, for instance, a rating from 0 to 10, also metaphors can work wonders here.
  • Do not hesitate using the ‘liberating structures’ (an example here). For instance, it can be a good idea to run a “hopes&concerns” 5 minutes chat with just one of the team members and then bring scale up the group until you reach all attendants. In this way, people will feel aligned an connected.

Summary

Retrospectives are unpredictable in many ways, however, I strongly believe that:

  1. Ensuring presence and connection
  2. Creating diversity.
  3. Focus in reaching quality actions.

Will work wonders to bring your retrospectives to the next level.

The importance of being strategic

by xavierfigueras, posted in Uncategorized

Did it ever happened to you that you invested efforts and by the end you did not get the expected outcome? Regardless of our position in the organization it’s always a good idea to have an eye view on what is going on, so that we can pull the right triggers to achieve the desired result. Furthermore, being aware of the cost of opportunity in everything we do will help us prioritize and make an efficient use of our time.

How to reach a certain goal?

Let me share with you the GOATA approach. Being strategic is all about mastering the how we reach a certain goal. If we do a breakdown it would look like this:

  • Goals: what is it that we are trying to achieve? what is the vision?
  • Objectives: what are the steps that will lead us to that goal?
  • Awareness: where are we playing? what is it that has changed? what is it that can help us?
  • Targets: How do we measure our progress?
  • Application: what are the actual actions in place?

AN EXAMPLE OF BEING STRATEGIC

Sports provide a very visual example on what being strategic means. In order to make the most out of it, we need to get eyes on the overall game, seeking our best next move, so that we can maximize opportunity and generate impact quickly.

Since images matter more than words, here is an example of how a few professional football players score versus 100 kids:

Keep it healthy

Once we get multiple tasks it’s easy to fall into the hard-working or action mode, however, I invite you to think twice before rolling up your sleeves. Running flat out might bring you some quick wins but will be detrimental in the long term. Your goal is to achieve a healthy sustainable working pace that aligns with your inner balance with your hopes and needs.

Work smart, not hard, my friend :)

MeetUp: Company Agility in Action

by xavierfigueras, posted in Uncategorized

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to attend a meetup event about agility organized by InnoIT in the center of Barcelona. The goal was to share tools that supported multiple organizations in their agile journey. So, what’s there?

1. Wardley Maps

The Wardley Maps come up as a solution to measure the organization’s capacity to anticipate technological change, demographic change or how user’s preference it’s going to impact us.

If you check out the web page www.learwardleymapping.com you’ll see they have a video that explains briefly what the wardley maps are about. As you can see we categorize each part of our process into the uncharted – industrialized axis, while on the Y axis you can see how we target our purpose strategically.

I found it extremely powerful in the sense that it obligates you to position your product and visualize your business strategy and creates awareness of the weak points and strenghts around it, so that you can adapt better as information emerges.

I really enjoyed this article which explains very well how can you operate based on that framework: https://medium.com/@hendrik_esser/fit-for-purpose-e442b9015ec7.

2. Flight Levels

Flight levels come in from the point that ‘agility is not about teams’. What this really means is that it’s more than that. Of course agility it will end up affecting the way teams work, however it should be the starting point, we need to see how agile we are at a strategic and end-2-end coordination level and here is where Flight Levels jump in.

If you are still interested in knowing more about flight levels I would recommend you to watch this video:

And buy this book from Klaus Leopold, as I just did 🙂

3. OKRs

I assume this is by far the best well-known tool from all so I won’t expand myself much. OKRs are meant to set a desired target state and find ways to measure our progress towards it.

In this website you’ll find some practical examples of how it works: www.whatmatters.com

4. EVIDENCE-BASED MANAGEMENT

As you can see Evidence-Based Management goes around the idea of focusing on customer outcomes (top axis) and organisational capabilities (bottom axis) to make better organizational decisions.

As you can see in this video:

One of the goals of evidence-based management is to ensure we capture all evidence by following six steps:

  1. Ask an answerable question to help you identify problems or possible solutions
  2. Acquire relevant information or evidence that will answer that question
  3. Appraise the quality of that evidence for its trustworthiness
  4. Aggregate the evidence by summarizing or pulling it together
  5. Apply it to the decision you are making
  6. Asses the outcome of that decision

I think the video explains quite well what the approach is, still, if you are interested in learning more, there is also this book available in amazon.

5. F4P

Fit for Purpose goes around the idea that in agile there is no “one fits all”. Here we are looking at our product from different angles:

  • Product
  • Metrics
  • Costumers

And we can go into deep to analyze how well we are performing at each front. An excellent example that they put was that for instance if you go in business class and they are constantly bothering you to offer you things the overall experience it’s ‘unfit’, within the fitness criteria metric.

To be honest it was not straightforward to find a video or explanatory site around the topic. This is the best I could find:

Recommended Bibliography

Summary

The meetup was very valuable to me. To be honest it was the first time I heard about the Wardley Maps and Fit for Purpose framework, plus it allowed me to have a better understanding on evidence based management and flight levels.

It is also true that during a meetup you really don’t have the chance to go deep into any of the topics, putting real life examples and discussing them with the group. Again, I think the goal of the meeting was accomplished which is to share and give an overview of the tools therefore I am grateful I could be there. Thanks Jerome!