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An AgilityHealth® Retrospective is a strategic retrospective that aims to help teams reflect on their last quarter or release and improve on the next quarter or release.

Your role in facilitating the Retrospective:

1. Launch Assessment to the Team
2. Facilitate the Assessment
3. Review Results
4. Analyze Radar
5. Create Growth Plan

The retrospective is made up of three parts. First, stakeholders and team members take the assessment, then the team analyzes the results and works together to build an actionable growth plan.

Launch the Assessment to the Team

Review the Retrospective Agenda with the team. If the assessment is being taken during the retrospective scheduled time, validate that you have everyone's correct e-mail addresses and then launch the assessment. If the team already completed the assessment on their own time or in another session, you can skip this step.

Once the assessment has been launched, team members will get an email similar to the below example. 

Each team member receives a unique assessment link in order to ensure each team member only completes the assessment one time. All answers are anonymous and will not be tied back to a team member in any way. We simply track whether each person that was sent the assessment has completed it or not and have functionality in place to allow the assessment to be re-sent if the email did not come through the first time.

Visit the Team Member's guide to Taking a Team AgilityHealth® Assessment for more information.

Facilitating the Assessment

Intro Talking Points 

These are suggestions for a TeamHealth® Retrospective (the scale may vary by assessment):

Best Practices for Facilitating the Assessment

Be very clear with participants when it’s ok to select N/A:

Participants may want to select N/A when they are not doing a practice described in the question; however, push them to score low instead if it is a practice they should be doing

An example of a competency that may actually be N/A would be a Kanban team that only does rapid response work may select N/A for “Long Term Planning” since it doesn’t apply to their type of work

Negative Feedback:

If any of the roles under leadership score low or have negative comments, talk one on one with them during the break and ask if they’d like to discuss with the team during the session or take offline individually, if needed.

“You don’t know what you don’t know”:

Encourage teams to think about “how they may not know what they don’t know” and have them score lower by default and only score high if they are “truly high-performing”, especially newer teams in their first year of Agile.

If your team is distributed and the retrospective will be virtual:

Use an online collaboration board (such as IdeaBoards) for the activity where team members break into small groups and discuss the dimensions

Have each person/group post their observations so they are visible

Use features within the online collaboration board for the dot voting exercise, when possible (for example, IdeaBoards has a voting feature)

Provide opportunities for everyone’s voice to be heard. If not all of the team members are remote, check in frequently with remote team members to get their input

Conduct a quick retrospective for the meeting at the end to get ideas for improvement and learn what worked well.

Also visit the Facilitator Quick Reference Aids for additional helpful tips, sample invitation emails, and more.

Review Results 

Once the team has completed the assessment, you’re ready to review the results. We recommend you take a few minutes to demonstrate how to read the radar, before having the team break into small teams to review the dimensions. Our How are Related Competencies Identified article provides a guide to Dimensions, Sub-Dimensions and Competencies, common patterns, and how competencies are related.

Review the comments first and hide any that need review

Before having the team break into groups to analyze the radar, be sure to review the textual responses and edit any that could tie back to a specific team member to ensure the results stay anonymous.

You have the option to hide all Team Member comments and/or hide all Stakeholder comments. This grays them out for you and stops the Team Members from viewing the comments until you're ready.

While comments are hidden, the Facilitator has the ability to screen the comments that came in and if needed, hide or reword any comments prior to the team seeing them. Learn more about hiding comments. 

Using Presenter mode as a Facilitator during a Retrospective allows you to share your screen without the comments you have hidden being seen. All hidden comments will be removed from view in Presenter mode. Learn more about Presenter mode. 

Analyze Radar

Have the team break into groups. If your company has the feature turned on to lock assessment results until they are manually shared by the Facilitator in the Retrospective, make sure to share the assessment results so the team can review them. 

Once broken into groups, each group should review one dimension each. To analyze the results, suggest they:

• View the detail view, with the dots for responses
• Zoom in to focus on that one section, making observations on Post-It Notes as they go
• Be sure to consider related competencies
• For a TeamHealth assessment, check the competencies in the Performance Dimension and the Happiness competency to see how strong the team is in relation to the top drivers for those metrics. Learn how to see top drivers for team performance. 
• Look for trends and review the textual responses to confirm their thinking
• Document their strengths, improvement areas, and any impediments they see

Gather the groups back together and have each one present their findings by dimension. As a whole group:

• Review the strengths, improvement areas and impediments found
• Look for trends
• Use the Idea Board to compile ideas for Growth Items and vote for the top issues
• Along with the Scrum Master, help them build a growth plan in AgilityHealth® with a few growth items for the team backlog and a few growth items for the leadership/organizational backlog

To help you with analysis, review the How do I analyze assessment results article.

Create Growth Plan

The key deliverable from a retrospective is the Growth Plan, which is made up of Growth Items, created by the team to act on the areas that will help the team to grow and to ask for help from Leadership on issues that are outside of the team’s control. Growth Items usually fall into two categories: Team and Organizational. 

We suggest the Facilitator and Scrum Master work together to capture Growth Items for the team during the retrospective and ensure that the Growth Plan is of good quality. Teams should create 1-2 growth items they themselves can work on, as well as 1-2 organizational growth items for Leadership to focus on. You can use Idea Board to brainstorm during the retrospective and team members can vote on which Growth Items to add to the Growth Plan.

Once the Growth Items have been agreed upon, they should be moved to the Growth Plan, which is located at the bottom of the radar results page for the team's assessment. You can do this in Idea Board by clicking either the team or organizational icon at the bottom of the winning idea cards. 

Once the Growth Items have been moved to the Growth Plan, they should then be edited to include additional information. This varies for Team versus Organizational Growth Items and is described in detail in this article: How do I create Growth Items and Build a Team Growth Plan.