Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: “How to start an effective Retrospective using Car Brand exercise”

This post is dedicated to a topic: “How to start an effective Retrospective”. I already blogged about this topic when I explained “How to start an effective Retrospective using Constellation exercise” the post can be found here. TThis exercise can be found in the book: “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives”, a book written by me and Ben Linders with the foreword from Esther Derby. The book can be downloaded by free in LeanPub.com or InfoQ.com, please download it and spread it within your colleagues.

One of the important parts of a successful retrospective, is an interesting “opener”, we must set a stage, allowing a team to feel comfortable to speak freely about any topic. This post describes the “Car Brand” exercise.

Here you can find my previous blog “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: “How to start an effective Retrospective using Constellation exercise””

What you can expect to get out of this technique
This is a simple exercise to set the stage for the team to start the Retrospective. Its a good exercise that allows people to show how they feel about how the sprint went without expressing openly their opinion, this is extremely important specially when the team is new to each other and they are not comfortable in showing their feelings or opinions openly.

When you would use this technique
I believe this exercise is super simple and does not require any special occasion. It can be used as an opener for any retrospective. This is a good exercise to reveal individuals´ opinion, allowing everyone to have a common understanding about what the others think. This is important because team members must be aligned.

How to do it
When the retrospective start make everyone feel comfortable and ask them a simple question: “If you think about this sprint as a brand car which car would you chose?”. For example if the sprint went so well that there is nothing to point out most probably everyone would chose a Ferrari. If the sprint had several ups and downs maybe a Fiat would be more suitable. Give them two or three minutes to think what is their brand.

When you feel that everyone knows which car they want, invite them one by one to reveal “their car”. Do not go into discussion at this point, people will have time to justify their choices quite soon, allow everyone to see what others chose first, this will give an overall feeling about where the team stands. After this exercise ask people to think about their dream car and give them 10 minutes to think about what they would change on the past sprint in order to have their “dream car”.

People will come up with dozens of different ideas, but based on my experience a lot of them will be common problems. You as facilitator try to group them into the same groups. Ask the team to use for example dot votes and select the most critical problem that should be tackled for the next sprint.

For this exercise the topic was car brand but you can use anything that makes sense for you. To run this exercise the team does not need to be collocated, team members can be spread all over the world and still be able to run this exercise using virtual tools.

In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives I am at the moment preparing an AGILE RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM. This is a complete self-study program where you will learn anything that you need to become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

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