Many teams use retrospectives as a one-off meeting, never reflecting back beyond the last few weeks. But problems aren't always limited to two-week sprints and this approach to your retrospective can miss the opportunity to discuss long-standing issues or high-level patterns.
Retrospective meetings were created to help teams create positive change and improvement. If you aren’t reviewing your retrospective goals and ensuring that action-items are complete, that change becomes borderline impossible. Retrium's Retrospective History helps teams review action items and discussion topics to identify issues over time.
So how can you ensure follow-through on action items?
First, an ambassador for the Action Item should remind the team to make the goal highly visible throughout the sprint. Why? Because the more visible something is, the more the team will remember to work on it and follow up. Things that are not immediately visible tend to be forgotten.
Write it down! Not only does this formalize the goal, and also acts as a reminder to create a clear and realistic goal that the team can achieve. If you use a kanban or retro board, you’ll quickly be able to see whether the Action Item is being worked on. Having a common location where people can return to the team’s Action Items allows the team to remain transparent on all ongoing projects.
Whether in your next stand-up or your next stand-up or your next retrospective, make the time to review your goal! Or else it just becomes another item clogging the backlog and a missed opportunity to improve.
Learn more about generating quality goals and strategies to improve follow-through in Chapter 6 of The Ultimate Guide To Agile Retrospectives.
Retrium organizes all of your previous retrospective meetings in one place. You can not only see a timeline of past conversations, but you can also view exactly what notes and actions were generated. At any time your team members can easily examine the action plan checklist to provide updates on item progress. There’s no limit to the number of insights you can gain by examining past meetings and reflecting on how far you’ve come.
.png){kind=small}
