Working with Remote Agile Teams: Retrospectives

Facilitating retrospectives is a tough challenge.  Facilitating retrospectives while working remotely is, most of the time, an even tougher challenge.  In Retrospective Meetings, the body language and non-verbal cues from participants is an important factor in the quality of the discussions and outcome of the meeting.  Not being able to see this, makes it really hard to do retrospectives while working remotely.  If you can have everyone on video in the online meeting for the retrospective, that is great, but even then you still have other challenges to face.

In this post, I share some learnings I have gained from facilitating retrospectives for remote teams.

Setting the stage

A big part of the effort in preparing for a retrospective meeting is understanding the context of the meeting. When you are co-located with the team in an office, it is easy to make observations, have quick chats with team members, and be “in-tune” with what is happening with the team. When working remotely you have to make an extra effort in connecting with the team. In doing so before the retrospective, you can make sure you have a good understanding about concerns the team would want to discuss in the meeting.

Flow of the meeting

When you are in an online meeting, it is easy to get distracted and lose track of what is happening in the meeting. As the facilitator of the retrospective, you need to guide the team through phases of the meeting. This is the flow of the meeting that I use:

1. Review action items and previous discussion items
2. Generate new discussion items
3. Select items to discuss
4. Agree on new action items and improvements to do
5. Closing of the meeting

During the meeting, I make sure to state clearly the phase or step we are in.  Groupmap also helps in directing the flow of the meeting.  In the tool there are visual indicators and UI interactions which helps remind participants about the phases of the meeting.

Facing Challenges

Encouraging active participation, dealing with periods of silence, and good engagement of participants in the meeting are common challenges encountered during retrospective meetings.

I think that in meetings with remote teams it is hard to avoid calling out names of individuals to have them speak. I usually want to avoid doing this, because I think participants should speak up whenever they want to say something and that they can choose to stay silent if they really have nothing to add to the discussion. However, calling out names can help participants take turns talking, like when two or more people start answering a question at the same time during the meeting. Calling out names can also be, sometimes, the only way to encourage participation especially if the team is newly formed and is just starting to get to know one another.

In online meetings without video, long periods of silence can be more uncomfortable as participants can’t see each other. I learned that as a facilitator, you should allow this period of silence to go on without speaking up. This gives the team the space they need so they can push themselves to be more engaged in the meeting. Eventually someone will speak up. Having video and being able to see one another makes dealing with this challenge easier. Everyone can see the body language of one another and the facilitator can also use the non-verbal cues for better handling of the period of silence.

Sometimes the team may not be in the mood for doing a retrospective.  Sometimes they are too busy with their current workload and would want to just focus on that.  In these instances, it may be more helpful to the team to cancel the retrospective.  I have also ended retrospective meetings early when I have observed that the team’s energy is quite low or they are not interested in doing the retrospective.  This does not mean that you would not be having retrospectives anymore, rather the team just needs space and time to overcome the current challenge they are facing.

Same old, same old

Overall having a retrospective meeting with remote teams is almost the same as having it with a co-located team. As a facilitator, you make sure that the team is engaged and actively participating as they discover improvements that they want to make to become a better team.

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Meetings

What is it like to be Agile while working remotely? I am an Agile Coach working at home and I work with teams having members who also work from their homes.  I have been working on this kind of environment and working setup for 8 years. In my current job, I am on my fourth year of being an Agile Coach. I have also worked as a Scrum Master for co-located teams so I have some experience working in an office setting.  In the early years of my professional career, I have worked as a software engineer, as part of a development team in an office setting.

When you are used to applying Agile principles and following Agile frameworks, I think that gives you the versatility to work in any environment and be successful. I would like to share my perspective on what it is like to be Agile while working with remote teams.  On this first blog for this series, I’ll talk about meetings in general.

Meetings

For me, scheduling a meeting involves creating a Google calendar event and inviting people to that event.  Google Calendar has nice features which helps you pick a good time for the meeting you are creating.  You can see the appointments people have on their calendars and you can even ask the app to find a good time slot for a meeting by telling it who you want to invite.  The app allows you to schedule recurring meetings and this is what I do for standups, retrospectives, and planning meetings.  I also make sure to set the correct timezone as I work with people in different countries.

We use Zoom for our online meetings.  Instead of reserving a meeting room, I would just create a Zoom meeting instance.  Going in the meeting room is done by clicking on a Zoom meeting URL.  I would usually post the link on the Skype group chat of the team two minutes before the start of the meeting.  I also post the Zoom URL on the Google Calendar event for the meeting so the attendees can access the link from there as well.

I am impressed with Zoom’s implementation on streaming video, voice and screen share during meetings.  Internet speed is not great here in the Philippines but somehow on Zoom meetings we get great quality for voice.  Greater still is that with Zoom, we can share video and do screen sharing without lags and problems with audio. This really helps in overcoming the challenges of communicating with your colleagues. It brings you closer to how the meeting would be if you are all in a room together. We would share video so that we can see each other rather than just hearing the voices of people we work with. Screen sharing is used to enhance discussions.  In Zoom you can view a gallery of the video of participants and see the screen share at the same time, it’s like being in a room and having something presented via a projector.

Daily Standups

When we have the daily standups, we are actually just sitting down in our own home offices. Hahaha! We use Zoom for the meeting. Instead of looking at a physical board, we have our virtual Kanban board on our LeanKit instance. LeanKit allows us to coordinate our work and represent it on a Kanban board that we can all access and use.

What’s Next?

On my next blog post for this series, I’ll share more about retrospectives and how we do it remotely.

 

Challenges of Retrospectives

One of the principles stated in the Agile Manifesto is:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

To apply this principle, Agile teams hold retrospective meetings at regular intervals (we do them every 2 weeks).  In retrospectives, the team discuss what they have experienced since the last meeting, reflect upon their observations, and agree to do improvements which would allow them to work more efficiently. This sounds simple enough but the retrospective meeting is one of the hardest meetings to facilitate when you’re an Agile Coach or Scrum Master.

Here are the top challenges I encounter when facilitating retrospectives:

Getting active participation

It is hard to a get a good discussion going during the retrospectives when only a small number of participants are speaking. If most of the team is satisfied with just listening, conversations tend to be one-sided, or only 2 persons are actively discussing.  Most of the time, the discussion ends prematurely.

Being comfortable with silence

As a facilitator, you are able to fulfill your responsibilities in the meeting when you let the team do the talking.  You are there to help the team discover for themselves what they want to do to improve. However, silence can be uncomfortable. Especially the silence which comes after you ask a powerful question. As a facilitator, you tend to panic when there is a long lingering silence, because it makes you think the meeting is a waste of time for everyone.

Asking powerful questions

In retrospectives you ask powerful questions to guide the discussion and make the team think hard about how they can improve. Most of the time the powerful questions you should ask is dependent on the responses you get from the team. However, if they are mostly silent during the meeting, you have nothing to work with.

The problems with getting active participation, being comfortable with silence, and asking powerful questions are even harder to face when you are working with remote teams.  You have online meetings which is usually done with voice-only calls.  You can’t see the body language of the participants and you miss out on non-verbal cues. You can’t see people nodding, frowning, glancing at something or someone, fiddling their thumbs, and you are not even sure if they have their full attention in the meeting.

Staying neutral

Good facilitators remain neutral during meetings. This enables the team to take ownership of achieving the goals of the meeting. In order to remain neutral, the facilitator should not have a vested interest on the outcome of the meeting.  This hard to do during retrospectives because as the team coach you feel responsible for making sure the team improves and that they grow to become more efficient in what they do. However retrospectives are more effective when the team itself decides what they want to do to improve.

Keeping meetings fresh

For retrospective meetings you can’t do the same thing over and over again.  The team will get bored and discussions will grow stale.  As the facilitator you have to use a wide variety of meeting formats, techniques and tricks to keep these meetings fresh so that the team is motivated to think about improvements they need to do.

People not wanting to think about how to improve

This may be the hardest challenge because this makes the retrospective meetings a total waste of time for all. Teams can become complacent and high performing teams may think that there is nothing more they can do to improve. It is up to the Coach or Scrum Master to challenge the team and not let the retrospective meeting become a routine that the team thinks they just have to endure.

One attitude which helps me face these challenges is: Being Persistent.  You have to keep at it. As the Scrum Master or Agile Coach of the team you have to “walk the talk”. You have to show the team members that you yourself is continuously improving. Can’t get the engagement you are expecting? Then learn about more ways on how to get the team engaged. Is the team getting tired of doing the same retrospective format every two weeks? Then learn more about new techniques which you can use. Do you need help in figuring out which approaches work best with the team? Then solicit feedback and ask the team members about the changes you can make in the way you facilitate the retrospective meeting. Just keep on doing the good work and making that effort to connect with the team. The alternative, which is to let the team settle for mediocrity of the status-quo and not aim to improve, would be anti-Agile.

In future posts, I plan to discuss what I have learned in facing these challenges and what tools and techniques I have added to my utility belt for overcoming these challenges.