Lean from the Trenches

Team Retrospectives

Our process improvement workshops are basically Scrum-style sprint retrospectives. By convention, the feature teams use the term retrospective for their process improvement workshops, and the cross-team uses the term process improvement workshop, so we’ll stick to that terminology here.

Each team has a retrospective every week or two, and the length varies from thirty minutes to two hours. Some teams just stand at their taskboard and do the retrospective; some go off to a separate room. Once we even went to a local pub. Usually the team lead facilitates the meeting, but sometimes they pull in someone else (like me).

Bringing in a team-external facilitator from time to time is usually a good idea because that gives the ...