Technology shouldn’t stand in the way of facilitating a great retrospective. As a Scrum Master or leader of your team, you can prepare and host effective remote retrospectives with thing.online. All the tools you need to go through the retrospective's agenda are handed out by your virtual assistant: thing.online.
Have a look at how you could make use of the numerous features.
Create and share the retrospective agenda with Flow. Then start leading the retrospective using the Speaker Panel: everyone will listen to you and no one can interrupt you unless you want them to participate, this will allow you to present the agenda and introduce the retrospective.
You can easily break the ice and get everyone involved by making them feel comfortable in the Conversation View. Everyone can participate in the conversation once you leave the Speaker Panel.
Now that the ice has been broken and everyone feels comfortable in the virtual room, it’s time to get to work. Bring everyone to the Focus View and start collaborating.
There you can share a Miro board, where you will have a good overview of all the ideas and thoughts of the participants. Start by asking them to write down in some words what they have been working on in the past Sprint. Remember, you can use the Speaker Panel any time to make sure everyone listens to what you are saying. Once they have done so, you can group the similar topics and list them by relevance, then start discussing them one by one.
Your time is limited: by using the thing Timer you can set time slots to discuss each topic. If you haven’t had enough time on one specific topic, you can always add some extra time, but keep in mind the agenda, you can see in the Flow Bar when you reach the end of this retrospective step.
You have discussed the most relevant topics of last Sprint, what went well and what has to change for the coming Sprint? Set the Timer and discuss.
To decide which points are the most relevant to improve in the coming Sprint. How to decide? You can switch from Miro to Sli.do to make a poll. When switching back to the Miro Board, the last version will stay unchanged, so you will be able to pick up where you left off before the poll. Otherwise, start a quick voting using Gestures, e.g. the participants vote with thumbs up or thumbs down.
After choosing the top 3 topics, discuss how to take action on them. Don't forget to set a Timer at the beginning of every discussion, or else you'll loose track of time.
At this point, the retrospective has served its purpose. The main issues from the past Sprint have been detected, targeted and will be improved in the following weeks. Until now, everyone has been able to participate and collaborate. You decide how to close the retrospective: take over the meeting and make a statement from the Speaker Panel or allow everyone to share their main takeaways.
In case the retrospective had to be stopped and rescheduled during the session, note that you can always close the meeting and pick up where you left off the next time, the agenda and shared documents will remain unchanged.
We're more than happy to talk to you. Starting from this scenario, let's talk about common scenarios you and your team has in your daily work and how thing.online can help you to tackle them.