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Retrospective script - Lean Coffee

The purpose of this, and every retrospective, is to help us to improve by coming up with a few concrete improvement actions that we can complete / test / do until the next retrospective. Small, concrete actions are preferred before large lofty goals that we don’t reach anytime soon. There will be another retrospective in a few weeks.

We are going to run a form a meeting called Lean Coffe. It’s a very simple yet effective and focused way to hold any form of discussion but today we are going to use it for retrospectives.

In the steps below I describe what you, as a facilitator need to think about and do in each step.

The total time for the exercise will be about 45 minutes. You will need a timer to run this effectively. And some post-its

Review (5 min)

• Read the previous improvment actions
• Did we do them?
  • If no - why not?
  • If yes - what happened?
• What should we think about writing new action items?

Generate data (10 min)

The topic of our discussion is:

What will make our learning even better in the next week?

Tell the group that the purpose of the exercise is to come up with two improvement

• Ask everyone to write down ideas, question or topics that would help us be better, in their mind.
  • Spend 3 minutes - time them
  • Write one topic per sticky - you can write as many stickies as you want
  • If you have posted a sticky you are only obliged to tell people what you meant. It could be a question you don’t have the answer to, a general inquire or something that you want to help understand
• Post the topic-stickies on the table
  • Don’t create any order
  • Group similar ones as you see them
• Ask people to dot-vote on the topics that they want to talk about
  • Allow for max 2 minutes for this
  • Each person has 3 votes, by putting a dot on the sticky
  • They can put all 3 on one sticky that they really want to talk about or spread them out
• While they vote create 3 stickies “Todo”, “Doing”, “Done” and post them on the board/table to form columns of a kanban board

Gather insights (25 min)

• Once everyone has voted, create a topic column called “Todo”
  • Move the first topic (with most votes) into “Doing”
  • Set a timer for 6 minutes
• Once the timer goes off vote if you want to continue talking or not
  • 👍  - continue another iteration
  • 👎 - on to the next
  •  👊 - I could go either way
• Once a topic is discussed - find an improvement action for it and move it to “Done”
  • Make sure it’s something that we can change until the next retrospective
  • Make sure it’s something that we can say if it’s done or not (“be better” is hard to track for example, how could we see if we are better or not?)
• Continue for 4 iterations or until you run out of topics

Close retrospective (2 min)

• Thank everyone for participating
• Do a fist-of-five vote for how good the retrospective was
• Ask participants to write, if the want, a post-it on what would make improve their rating
• Bring the action items to your mob station