Improve Every Retrospective! Real Solutions for Every Team Leader, Facilitator, and Participant
. . . Aino has shared a robust, curated list of antipatterns and how to avoid them. . . . And she has shared so much more than tips and techniques. You will find a gold mine–with precious nuggets, including her personal experiences, effective facilitation resources, and pointers for extracting yourself and your team when you’re stuck.
— From the Foreword by Diana Larsen, co-author, “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”
Retrospectives are indispensable for continuous learning and improvement in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other contexts, but most of us have suffered through at least one retrospective that was a waste of time, or worse. In this book, Aino Vonge Corry identifies 24 reasons that retrospectives fail and shows how to overcome each of them.
Using the familiar patterns approach, Retrospectives Antipatterns introduces antipatterns related to structure, planning, people, distributed teams, and more. Corry shares traps she’s encountered and mistakes she’s made over more than a decade of leading retrospectives and then presents proven solutions. With her insights and guidance, you can run enjoyable retrospectives that deliver concrete improvements and real value–or at the very least recognize when you are making the same mistake as the author!
Create a common language, actionable solutions, and proven plans for solving the retrospective problems you’ll encounter most often
Recognize symptoms, assess tradeoffs, and refactor your current situation into something better
Plan more effectively: decide who should attend and facilitate, when to schedule your retrospective, and how much time to set aside
Handle people problems: deal with negativity, silence, distrust, disillusionment, loudmouths, and cultural differences
Facilitate better virtual retrospectives, with tips for online retrospectives included in each antipattern.