I’ve just tried this with my team and found it worked a treat.
We have a number of people working remotely for various reasons, I decided to try a remote LEAN Coffee style retro. We fired up Trello and Go To Meeting and created 4 columns:
- Discussion
- In Progress
- Done
- Actions
The initial blog that gave me the idea was http://www.agilecafe.org/lean-coffee-retrospective/. We spent 5-10 minutes adding items to the board and then each team member was given 3 points to spend on any items. I kept track of points and after all votes reordered the board according to the values assigned.
We chatted through each point for 5-10 minutes and ended the retro when we hit our time limit. Actions arising out of the discussions were immediately recorded in the actions panel. I’ve saved the board to track the actions and the unspoken items. We’ll follow up later.
I love how this worked. Conversations were natural and solutions positive. I am really grateful for the learning from it. So, this is definitely a keeper.
I’m curious about how others run the Lean Coffee format remotely. How did you find the experience?