This really is one of my favourite retrospectives to perform at the end of a quarter or year. Even though there is a healthy push to celebrate success more often I still find teams really enjoy taking time out too ‘look at the big picture they achieved’. In addition to the common Timeline Retrospective I personally encourage team members to add in a thank you to each other regarding particular events. Intra-team acknowledgement goes a long way to building affirmative collaboration for future events.

The purpose of the Timeline Retrospective is to gather data, discussion and action from events plus their impact over a selected time period.

How:

1. Agree Timeline Duration

2. Populate Timeline

- add events, colour coding according to your legend

- add your personal satisfaction during that even time

3. Discuss the sequences, what happened, thoughts, insights

4. Reflect on the data map

- achievements

- learnings done

- patterns occurring

- surprises we didn’t expect

- be sure to call out any thanks to each other

5. Summarise the team actions and add to the backlog

I always find there’s multiple benefits from this type of retrospective

• gives the team the opportunity to reflect on achievements, how they responded to events and to give thanks to each other

• visualising all the team has been involved in provides tangible context to the amount of work they have been involved in

• articulates what happens and what we felt / responded to the event. Being articulate about the two allows for individuals to express their point of view

• acts as a good milestone ceremony to mark a change in focus

• solicits team affirmed improvement actions

#retrospective #feedback #agile #teams

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