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October 17, 2018

Retrospective: Remote Retro with Trello

Project management

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What is this article about?

While looking for a format that could be used well for a remote retro, I had the idea that the desired functions could also be mapped via a Trello board.

With Trello, you can create new cards ad hoc and everyone who has opened the board sees the changes without a refresh. You can let off steam with stickers, pictures and giphys and you can also vote via a power-up.

Preparation

For the retro I created a new board and invited all team members to join. I did this at least a week before the retro to have some time so that colleagues could register if necessary and get familiar with the tool.

For the board, I thought about which lists I wanted to create during the event, but didn't create them yet for the sake of clarity.

80% of my team had already worked with Trello and knew most of the features. On the day of the Retro, I briefly touched on what I planned to do later during the Daily, so that everyone could try out for themselves whether everything worked as desired in the app or on the notebook. That was very helpful.

We only had one colleague with us at the first Retro who didn't get everything working right away. Understandably, he was a little unmotivated. So it helps extremely to invest some time in advance in order to have everyone actively present at the Retro later on.

We used the Power Up features "Giphy" and "Voting". Simple images can be placed on the cards via the attachment.

Implementation

Check-in

For the check-in I created a list with the heading "Your Giphy for the Sprint". Everyone now had the task to create a matching card with included Giphy. There was a maximum of 5 minutes for this. I then went through the cards from top to bottom and the creator briefly told something about his selected image.

Gather Data

For the collection of what happened during the sprint, I created four new lists "This went well", "This goes better", "This was total garbage" and "Thank you".

The team now had 8 minutes to create cards corresponding to the lanes.
We then went through these cards individually to briefly introduce the topics and clarify questions of understanding.

Voting
Depending on the number of cards or the time available, the team members then had "n" votes, which they could assign via the "Voting" power-up.

I sorted the cards with votes into a new lane "To be discussed", descending by the number of votes. We started talking about the card with the most votes. When we felt we had enough, we moved on to the next card. Here we could also set time limits.

Action Items

If in the course of the discussion on a topic an action item arose, I created it in a new lane "Actions". Shortly before the end we went through these items again. "Are we really hoping to get something out of this?" "Who will make sure the measure is implemented?" "Which of the measures is most important to us?". My goal here was to take as few measures as possible so that they would have a higher chance of being implemented. There should have been three pieces, maximum four.

Conclusion

Since this was the first time I had done this retro, there was a feedback lane at the end where each team member could give input via a card. The format was well received, so we are now sharing it on the blog.

Materials

Remote retro doesn't require any offline materials. However, you should have a room with a large TV/beamer for the board, as well as good video or phone tooling to include colleagues who can't be there at the time.