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If your Scrum Team regularly cites “Better Communication”, “Improve Quality”, “Less Stress”, “More Teamwork”, etc., etc. as Retrospective Action Items, consider me completely unimpressed. I like fixing those things, but as Action Items for a Retrospective, they are milquetoast and dull. I would also guess that if those are Action Items coming out of your Retrospective, these are recurring organizational issues that remain unresolved. So let’s figure how to make better Action Items and maybe we can kill these recurring issues.
The lack of specificity is very common for new Teams or for Teams with a great deal of oblivion and cynicism. Another pattern I see with Retrospectives is when it comes time for taking ownership of Action Items, no one will sign-up to implement an idea or the entire Team takes responsibility. No one taking ownership is just sad, but everyone taking ownership is simply a defense mechanism to avoid responsibility to make Scrum successful. For new Teams or cynical Teams, group ownership of an Action Item does not work.
What I have found quite helpful in these situations is to introduce a facilitation tool from Gamestorming – the Who-What-When Matrix . IME, the way to break passivity, oblivion and cynicism is to restore hope. Using this tool in a Retrospective (and any other conversation where action items are required) is one step in the right direction of bringing back hope. When people see that they can affect positive change in their environment through a series of short, focused steps they become hopeful that things can really change. Little changes do not look impactful in the beginning, but a series of small, easy-to-impelment changes add up over time to a big change in the way the organization feels and operates.
So now for my Who-What-When matrix:
For more on Gamestorming, see my 2013 book review for deeper insights.