Thursday, August 8, 2019

Any Idea For Fun Retrospective?

Personally as a scrum master, sprint retrospective is agile ceremony that I love the most because I will schedule it at the end of sprint (after sprint review/demo) and I will have mini game with small celebration with the team.

One important factor to have effective retrospective is everyone feel safe and relax to share their feeling, opinion, and idea. That's why I like to have games or fun activities as ice breaker to make sure they feel relax.

Here's some sample of fun retrospective that I did before with team:

1. Story telling with stickers:
Materials: A3 white paper, cartoon stickers (in this scenario I'm using Dragon Ball, Marvel and DC characters).
Divide team into couple groups, and give them 15 mins time to discuss and design some story line based on condition happened in last sprint. Then they need to present it to others. Surprisingly, everyone actually has some hidden "art" skill to create a good and funny story. Trust me, it's interesting and good way to understand team's feeling based on the expression and the story they share.



2. Barrel pirate game:
Divide team into 3 groups (red, green, blue) based on the "sword" color, everyone is given 1 sword then need to put the sword into the barrel hole. Whoever that lucky and able to make the pirate jump, then get 1 score. We have 3 rounds of game to decide the winner with most of score. It's quite fun, everyone can scream and feel the excitement.



3. Build spaghetti tower:
Materials: angel hair spaghetti, marshmello.
Divide team into couple groups, and with below rules:

  • Each team is given 20 stick of angel hair spaghetti and 8 marshmallow
  • Each time is given 10 minutes time with detail of:
  • 2 minutes for planning discussion what to build
  • 3 minutes for build execution
  • 2 minutes to review if want to change design or required new spaghetti or marshmallow
  • 3 minutes to continue build again

Objective: to build tallest building with the material, stand strong, and no waste.



4. Wish list card:
Using https://ideaboardz.com/
It's a good session to capture everyone's expectation toward others. I created 1 board using ideaboardz contains available roles in our team, and everyone can write their wish list or expectation on others based on role.

The wish list template is "I want/need/wish  <role name / person name> to be/to have/to <wish sentences>".
Respective team will read the feedback and provide 3 measurable action items and put prioritization.




5. Kudos card:
Materials: Use KUDOS CARD to write "thank you" words to others.
Format on kudos card: To <someone> or <role> For being <gratitude sentence>, from <sender>.
One paper is equal one chocolate, when give the paper to others, the sender should give 1 chocolate as a gift.
Everyone needs to read all KUDOS CARD that they receive.

This card and chocolate are token of appreciation to others, I can see some team members are smiling and blushing the moment they read the card from others. There's no early or late to appreciate others, start to say thank you to others today :)



It's just sample what I did with the team, there's so much more. Normally I got the idea based on my previous experience as event committee or organizer, from books, YouTube, or blogs.

Hope these idea can also be useful for your team as well. Be creative and have fun with your team :)

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