CHRISTMAS RETROSPECTIVE

Christmas Retrospective was thought for Scrum teams (although it can be used in different situations) to think about the sprint goal and the outcomes of the sprint. You can use it with teams that adopted different methodologies too, just think about the biggest outcome or the North Star you wanted out of these last weeks of work.

You can get the template here.

Steps:

1. Write the sprint goal on the star on top of the tree;
2. The top layer of the tree is for the things that made us reach the goal;
3. The middle layer of the tree is for things that we need to do more/better as a team;
4. The bottom layer of the tree (is getting rotten) is for things pulling us away from our goal;
5. The gifts are the actions the teams will do during the next cycle.

Use round post-its if you can, this will make it look more like Christmas Balls!

My friend and colleague Diogo Nunes, gave the following suggestion (thanks for it).

Alternative:

Instead of the tree layers, you could do the following:

• the tree is what we did well, “green is good!;
• the yellow ribbons are what the team needs to do to keep the tree together and strong, “yellow is improvement”;
• the red balls are the difficulties we had, “red is bad”, “ah .. balls!”.

Suggestions:

• Give 5 minutes for the team to create cards at the beginning;
• If the team is big and you are restricted by time you may consider limiting the number of cards per person;
• Don’t let people put the cards on the template before everyone finishes, this will avoid bias;
• Don’t cluster cards before everyone does a quick elevator pitch of what they meant with the card. Just because people write the same sentence doesn’t mean they are talking about the same thing;
• As always don’t forget to start with the pending actions as retrospectives are for continuous improvement (C.I.) of the team. Actions should be part of the “working” board in order to achieve C.I..

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!