Gus Talks on Retrospectives: Attack of the oversized story cards

I'd like to introduce you to Gus Power. I've been working with Gus since June and I'm always ready to learn from him. He's one of the few coaches in the UK with lean manufacturing experience having worked at Dell while they engaged consultants from Toyota. Gus is full of ideas and insights and I'm pleased he's decided to blog about a recent heartbeat retrospective he facilitated with our team. So, without further ado I pass you over to Gus:

For this weeks' iteration retrospective we tried a homegrown variation on the usual heartbeat format. The idea was to condense the brainstorming and dumb mapping exercises into one activity, using the familiar representation of business value - the story card - as a guide.

We drew up some big story cards on flip-chart paper and labeled them. In this instance we used the categories:

• Slicing and Progress
• Story detail
• Ownership
• Tracking
• Estimation
• Pairing
• Acceptance testing

The cards were stuck on the wall and the team was divided into small groups of 3-4 people. The team members brainstormed aspects of the past iteration using post-it notes - blue for good and pink for bad. These were stuck on the relevant area of the story card. It's useful to have the iterations' story cards available for reference.

Written by: Gus Power


Tags: retrospective

Posted by Simon Baker @ permalink