July 2006
Intermediate to advanced
200 pages
3h 24m
English
Content preview from Agile RetrospectivesBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
6.3 Activity: Five Whys
Use this to generate insights in an iteration, release, or project retrospective.
Purpose
Discover underlying conditions that contribute to an issue.
Time Needed
Fifteen to twenty minutes.
Description
Team members work in pairs or small groups to look at issues. They ask “Why?” times to get beyond habitual thinking.
Steps
Introduce the activity by saying “Now that we know what’s happened, let’s look at why it happened.”
-
Review the issues and themes that the team has already identified.
-
Divide the team into pairs or small groups (no more than four to a group). And explain the process.
“One person asks the other(s) why an event or problem occurred.”
“In response to the answer, the questioner asks why that happened.”
“Record the responses that come out of the fourth or fifth ‘Why?’”
-
Monitor the time, and ring a chime or otherwise announce when the time is up.
-
Have the groups report what they discovered.
-
Use this information as input into the next phase, Decide What to Do.
Materials and Preparation
Use this in conjunction with an activity that generates themes or a list of potential problems, for example Patterns and Shifts.
Examples
Here’s an example. Say the issue is that the iteration review meeting never starts on time.
Q1: Why did we start our review meeting late on Thursday?
A: The room wasn’t available.
Q2: Why wasn’t the room available?
A: We forgot to put it on the meeting schedule.
Q3: Why did we forget ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.