Retrospective with timeline

I hope you do your retrospectives regularly? That is a good way to learn about what you do, and to keep your continuous improvements (kaizen) going. In this blog post I will describe a variant of a retrospective we performed, with a timeline to visualize what have happened during the time period we discussed. We used stickies in different colors for Good (Green), Bad (Red) and Improvements (Yellow) that we put up on the timeline. Why did we use it? The timeline helped us remember better.

Preparations

Before the actual retrospective meeting, you need to prepare the timeline. Basically remember on a high level what was done during the time period. I sat down and did this on a piece of paper.

In our case the time period spent over 6 months and I draw boxes for the main activities that happen. I also added numbers to each activity that was used as reference (see more information about that below). That was all the preparations I did before the meeting.

Retrospective with timeline

This is how the “retrospective with timeline”-meeting was performed.

1. Some 5-10 minutes before the meeting started, I went to the meeting room and draw on the whiteboard the timeplan that I’d prepared. I also brought my stickies in different colors.
2. The meeting started with me explaining the procedure. That each participant should think for 10-15 minutes and write stickies categorized as: Good (Green), Improvement (Yellow) or Bad (Red) and also add the number to reference the activity. A certain number (in our case 7 – Common) was used to specify common things that couldn’t sort under a activity, or covered the whole time period. The numbering made it easy to put up the stickies on the whiteboard.
3. After all the stickies from the meeting participants were added to the whiteboard, they were discussed individually. We used the numbering to do all “Good, Improvement and Bad”-stickies for the activity in question. It becomes very visible if an activity was successful or not (a lot of Green stickies, versus a lot of Yellow/Red ones).
4. After the meeting I always take a picture of the whiteboard using my mobile phone. The numbering on the stickies makes it easy to take them down and move them to your desk, where you preferably produce some sort of documentation of the meeting.

Summary

This retrospective is the one we used back in the days we had Scrum as our agile framework, but now with the timeline as a twist. The timeline adds value if the time period discussed is long (in our case 6 months, but can be both shorter or longer depending on the context), or if persons have been “in an out” for the activities (not participating for the whole time period).

All the best,
 Tomas from TheAgileist