My current team runs weekly retrospectives using the Lean Coffee format. More and more, I find that the items people are bringing up aren’t really important or could just be a question in Slack.
For example, someone recently made a topic for how we can test credit card payments. Another topic was navel gazing about how we use Jira and multiple team members asked “what’s the problem you’re hoping to solve?” to which the only answer was “That’s not what I’ve seen elsewhere”.
I’m beginning to think that there’s something wrong with our format or prompts, in that we aren’t identifying important issues for discussion. Perhaps the format is stale or there’s no serious issues lingering each week?
Any advice on alternative formats, how to get better feedback, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
This is a perfect topic for retrospectives.
How do the others see your retrospectives? Are the retrospectives productive? Do you identify and resolve issues? Do you have issues you do not identify and resolve in this format? Is the form stale? What needs to change?
Talk about the goals and focus of your retrospectives. Is it a place for “open ended” questions and discussion? Or should it be more focused on factual or felt issues and irritations? (Doesn’t mean it can’t be gaining others views on personal irritations.)
In my team we have bi-weekly sprint meetings and retrospectives. Our agile master (basically scrum master) prepares a themed board. Themes may liven and lighten up the process. - Personally, I don’t like them much, and feel like the prepared structured format often doesn’t offer or allow me to raise questions and issues that came up - but I’m not letting that stop me from raising them.
Every week feels quite often to me. Consider whether and how spreading them may change them - possibly for the better.
Consider making “nothing to discuss” a fine occurrence.
Consider whether other formats separate from retrospectives could focus retrospectives into something more specific.