During an especially busy sprint, the Scrum team insisted on skipping the sprint retrospective so they could keep working. Instead of arguing with the team, I decided to ask a simple question: “What happened during the sprint that created this pressure at the end of the sprint?” A developer quickly replied that the product backlog items were unclear, and that the development team ran into a few surprises along the way. So I asked, “Is there anything we could do during the next sprint to help avoid this situation?” Another developer suggested holding refinement sessions to work on PBIs prior to sprint planning. I smiled and encouraged them to add this idea to their sprint backlog for the next sprint.
You see what I did there? Simply by asking a couple of questions, I managed to hold a mini, impromptu sprint retrospective.
Here are the things that I learned from this situation:
- This exchange took five minutes and the team had improvements for the next sprint.
- Sometimes we have to be clever in the way we work with immature Scrum teams.
- Keep the purpose of the sprint retrospective in mind. In this brief interaction, we got a good improvement idea quickly. Claim the win and move on.