Agile retrospectives will help your team continually improve. They provide a forum in which teams can inspect and adapt their way of working with a view to making themselves better. They focus the natural desire of team members to improve, to provide actionable steps that they can take. As part of a teams core discipline, they ensure that they are equipped to adapt and improve to changing requirements and environments.

Product development is full of uncertainty. Agile methods meet this uncertainty with fast feedback. Fast feedback creates information and learning that reduces uncertainty. The result is a guiding light, enabling teams to iterate towards their goal. In much the same way, teams working together do not know ahead of time the perfect way to work. They can use the same principles to iterate their way of working to a more successful and enjoyable way of working. Agile retrospectives enable teams to do this in a structured way. The techniques that teams use can greatly improve the speed and to degree that they learn to work more effectively with one another.

In the past this learning was often not acknowledged or even actively suppressed because it often coincide with what organisations understood to be a failure. In cases where this ‘failure’ was not suppressed it I was all too common for teams be taken to a ‘wash up’ or ‘post mortem’ which were primarily about assigning blame rather than learning from what had gone before. When this was combined with the fact that success and failure was only measured very infrequently (after a 3 month release for example) meant that improvement amongst teams was haphazard at best. Agile retrospectives are a systematic way that teams can gather and acknowledge learning. The learning can then used to ensure that the problems that the team face are not tackled in the same way with the same result.

There is no way to formulate the perfect way of working ahead of time. All teams can say for certain is that over time, committing to continually improving through using Agile Retrospectives will drive them towards better results.

##How we can help you?

We can provide training, mentoring and strategic consulting to help you get started with agile retrospectives.

We can facilitate specific retrospective sessions. We can facilitate large end of project retrospectives, in order to draw out the most learning from your investment. Alternatively we can facilitate smaller group sessions and provide mentoring to others to develop the skill for future use.

We also provide advanced coaching for those with established facilitation skills. Through observation we will provide specific and actionable feedback to improve your organisation’s continuous improvement culture and capability.

##Why us?

At Neuri we have extensive experience in helping organisations build a sustainable continuous improvement culture. Working with technology teams and stakeholders, our aim is to instil a problem solving mentality using a variety of different tools and techniques, guided by structured learning and experimentation. We are also authors of 50 Quick Ideas To Improve Your Retrospectives.