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The format/structure for this retrospective is based upon the one developed by Chris Stone – The Virtual Agile Coach.
The retrospectives formats created and shared by Chris are an excellent way of engaging teams and taking a new perspective on the challenges that teams face and the successes that they achieve. They provide the opportunity for teams to identify ways of continuously improving through the use of analogies linked to music, film, TV and more. With Chris’s permission I have used the format/structure to create a retrospective based upon the music of The Beatles.
There are numerous songs by The Beatles from which agile analogies can be drawn. In fact, Mike Cohn wrote a blog post in 2018 identifying ten things that The Beatles taught him about agile. In this retrospective the team use the following six Beatles song titles as the focus of the questions that the team then look to answer:-
The Long And Winding Road – Where are we heading? How will we get there?
Getting Better – What have we improved? What did we learn?
Come Together – How good is our collaboration as a team? How could we improve it?
Eight Days A Week – What is causing us to work overtime? What were we unable to complete?
I Want To Hold Your Hand – How can we better support each other? What external support do we need?
Let It Be – What should we leave alone? What os too risky to touch?
The team are asked to write their thoughts on post-it notes in order to answer these questions, before each category is reviewed, grouping similar themed responses. The team then identify actions that they wanted to take in.
Below are the brief instructions for running this retrospective.
Instructions for running the ‘The Beatles’ retrospective
Run time: 1 hour (dependent on discussions)
Equipment required: White board (or similar), post-it notes, pens
- Depending on your artistic ability, draw images representing each of The Beatles songs (alternative print pictures and put these on a wall/whiteboard)
- Explain to you team the meaning of each segment and questions to be answered
- Distribute post-it notes and pens and ask the team to write down their thoughts, comments and/or questions (ideally at least one post-it note per person per segment)
- Review and discuss each segment in turn, grouping common responses
- Create actions and assign owners
It would be great to receive feedback from you and your team on the format of this retrospective and it’s ability to generate valuable actions.