I’ve been trying to following the topic at: Your Favorite Agile Retrospectives. POST THEM HERE AND LETS BUILD THE ULTIMATE LIST but with 58 posts, it’s a prairie harvest of ideas but I’m looking for specific situational feedback.
We had something go to shit for a specific team. A major release push before the end of year holidays where they were told that “this was the right time to do overtime” and that we’d sleep well and recover over the holidays and come back refreshed and run a proper flow/process in the new year. They pulled it off and did it. They came back refreshed and had a full week of breather and recovery… (smelling the “and then” coming?)
2nd week of the new year and we learned that the first (and only fully live) customer on the product had been promised some stuff with a deadline in 3 weeks and the implementation group on site realized they couldn’t deliver with custom extension tools (something they spent 2 months to figure out without us knowing this problem existed). So, the team was asked to bypass all process, all quality measures, and work two weekends in a row to shoot the moon.
Impressive part… they did. (though we now need them to loop back and do proper cleanup of the mess, dragging out morale / burnout and letting exec’s forget the work wasn’t done with the deploy).
We want to have a post-mortem with the team next week as we come back in for a soft landing and try to recover.
My main question is this… anyone have ideas for the best format for this kind of retro? Our standard approach with the leaders and soft skills available will suffice, but if someone here has a specific format for this specific case… I’m open to ideas!
Thanks!