Scrum Retrospectives

Retrospectives:

Very recently I have been working with this awesome Sports media company and we are in Sprint 3 now with one of the core product teams. I try and keep things different every Retrospective so that things don't get boring and uncreative. In the first retro I used the 'Mad, Sad, Glad' method of extracting data as suggested in the 'Agile Retrospectives' book. In the next one I used the High and Low points dots method mixed up with the timeline method. In this Sprint I used the Story format which really suits us because most of our work is editorial stuff.
To be honest before trying this I had my doubts. I had read about this technique a couple of years a go but did not have the courage to try it. Maybe it was the corporate environments? I don't want to blame anyone else but me, although corporate environments suck big time.
It started off as a suggestion from me to the team about using this technique. I said "Once upon a time, there was a a Team called Panthor" and the rest was (truly) history. Thanks to the awesome Product Owner and the Team members who helped make it a big success.

Observations:

The Team members felt loose and the story format kind of broke the ice immediately.

An excellent writer and "notes grasper" was definitely needed to make this a success.

What helped is focusing on the good things first and then moving to the bad things.

This method broke the ice and team members were open about talking about things that they normally might not have spoken about in a formal environment, but what was even more important was getting detail oriented and figuring out what exactly went wrong. A few team members took lead on that and it helped a lot.

After all the discussions were close to be concluded, I made sure that we documented a solution to the identified issue.

All these suggested solutions became our Sprint Goals for the next Sprint, which created a positive atmosphere and motivated the Team to move up one level.