Retrospectives are all about making your team better. Working with agile development, you know that it is an important part of the process to continually reflect on, adjust, and improve your work process. Unfortunately, some retrospectives are facilitated in a way so that they are wasting time instead of being the rewarding learning process they should be.

This workshop provides a practical approach to retrospectives facilitation. There will be a short introduction to the concept, activities, motivation, and challenges. Participants will get an opportunity to try the techniques in practice and discuss their own experiences and get advice on specific problems from their everyday lives.

We will look at decision making, body language, the psychology behind retrospectives, online retrospectives, different types of retrospectives for different situations, and you will be able to get feedback on how you facilitate if you wish to. The course is based on my book.

Agenda:

In the morning Aino will give an overview of the content and we will create a plan for what to focus on based on your expectations. Initially, the plan is to focus on common challenges in retrospectives offline as well as online, body language, psychology, team building, decision making, and structuring meetings in general.

In the afternoon Aino will share anecdotes about facilitating retrospectives, and based on these anecdotes she will focus on different patterns and antipatterns. We might also look at different technologies to support online retrospectives if there is an interest in this.

Take aways:

• How to plan, and facilitate a retrospective in the most effective way
• How to avoid the most common antipatterns in retrospectives
• How to manage different personality types in a retrospective

Target Audience: Retrospectives facilitators, either novices or experienced who need new input.

Language: English or Danish

Price: for up to 15 people, 45.000 DKK plus VAT, or 6000 EUR (plus travel and accommodation if needed)

Duration: 1 day on site, or two half days online

Feedback from former attendees:

”Aino taught me new facilitation techniques and tools for the retrospective toolbox. They were highly customizable to our organization and the teams I’m working with and thereby continuously provide value for both”

Frederik Skaanild Grønne, Scrum Master, Salling Group

“After attending Ainos’ Retrospective Antipattern Workshop, we changed the way we run retrospectives in our team: By applying new methods and changing the setup of the retro, we now generate more insights from our discussions and the team is more involved. I can highly recommend the course to everyone that want raise their quality of retrospectives.” 

Vera B., Program Manager, Microsoft

“We’ve had the pleasure of working with Aino in a combined setup of retrospective facilitations and workshops for teams and management. In particular, Aino’s ability to combine her vast practical experience with great communication skills made sure that the whole event was a great success. Aino quickly understood our maturity level and what we needed to gain from both the retrospectives and workshops. And because of her excellent skills on reading a room, she tailored the retros to the teams during the sessions and adjusted the agenda after the first workshop to make the second fit even better.”

Jeannette Schmidt Hansen, Agile Coach and Eva Knudsen, Scrum Master, Grundfos

“Thank you again for the great workshop! We have received very positive feedback from the Scrum Masters. Even though they all had different knowledge/experience with the retrospective, they all found the workshop valuable and that is a big success”

Silvia Schena, Agile Process Manager, Universal robots

“As a director of engineering, I’ve offered this coaching to all engineering managers and some lead developers in our group. Everyone had positive feedback, and I see the impact now through increased energy in the team,  increased frequency of retros, and that retro facilitators now have a larger set of tools and exercises to better customize their retro to the particular situation.”

Karl Krukow, Engineering director, GitHub

Feedback from the O’Reilly Online Training course:

• The guidance was clear and I feel I could act on it. The pace was gentle enough to start with and went into sufficient detail later.
• It was loaded with lots of experience
• Useful lessons that can be applied. Course content well organized and presented. Kept my attention for the full three hours. Excellent.
• Aino’s enthusiasm was great, anecdotes and general structure, room for questions (and answers!)
• The speaker – she’s amazing! Great! Interactive parts – always nice to have. Good thing with the bio breaks 🙂
• It was awesome session! Love the slides with Octopus 🙂

“At first I was slightly disappointed: “oh I know all this.” Then I reflected with a colleague and summarised for her what I heard. Structuring my thoughts for her made me realize how much additional value there was, e.g. the engaged audience that asked questions and shared additional insights. Seeing how you commented on those suggestions made it clear you are a pro and know your stuff.

I particularly liked how much time you took to thoroughly answer questions right when they came up. You time management was superb. Pros don’t rush participants through their content.

Your session was a great example of the fact that good facilitation looks easy but is not simple.”

Maria Wichmann, Team Collaboration Consultant