Enterprise Retrospective Facilitation Guide

Enterprise Retrospective Facilitation Guide......

Introduction......

Participants / Roles......

Facilitation Overview......

Facilitator Game Flow......

General Hints for Facilitating the Games......

Speed Boat Game Lobby Facilitation Script......

Speed Boat Game Facilitation Notes......

Instructions: Tailor this guide for your project.

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide a Facilitation guide to the online retrospective project for <company>.

We’re hoping to play multiple games based on one Speed Boat game definition.

Please review to the PowerPoint explanation of this event for additional details.

Participants / Roles

Role / Person / Notes
Sponsor
Business sponsor for the event. Defines objectives. / <name>
Producer
Organizes the event, focusing on training, consistency and logistics / <name>
Facilitators
Runs the event. Key responsibilities:
1.Answers questions from participants.
2.Draws information from participants
3.Ensures participants complete on time. / Global team of <company> and 3rd party facilitators.

Detailed team of facilitators and players managed in Excel.

Facilitation Overview

Facilitators will paste the scripts into the lobby one line at a time after the players have joined. They will check for understanding and/or questions after this information are presented and before they start the game. During the game facilitators will also refer to this to help them in facilitating the game.

  • <name> is the Producer.
  • You’re the facilitator.
  • The guest list is an OPEN guest list, which means you can share the URL of the lobby with EVERYONE.
    However, you must ensure that all players have a valid email address.
  • You CAN add players to a game while it is being played. Players who click on the lobby link will be presented to you for acceptance into the game.
  • Your players will also be able to invite other players to the game.

Facilitator Game Flow

Here is the general flow of the game.

  • Welcome players to the game.
  • Emphasize the structure of the layers and the regions. Let players know that the feedback they get from the tool tip when moving items is the layer and region of the item.
  • Feel free to explicitly model the placement, movement, and deletion of items in the game.
  • Encourage a game flow of adding items, then reviewing them as a team.
  • Encourage players to use the chat log to capture any feedback on ideas or items that don’t easily fit their perception of an apple.
  • Remember that the chat facility stays open after you end the game. You should end the game when players start to leave.

General Hints for Facilitating the Games

  1. Essential Do/Don’ts:
  2. Don’t make any promises on priorities.
  3. Don’t make any commitments.
  4. Don’t talk negatively about the current process.
  5. Don’t talk negatively about any related and/or potentially competing organization or method.
  6. Don’t say “That should be easy”.
  7. Don’t say “That is too hard”.
  8. Participate nonjudgmentally.
  9. Make sure they know that the chat logs, including whispers, are public and will be used for data analysis.
  10. Whispers: Remember that you get to see all whispers. Refrain from commenting on whispers, but use them to understand what’s happening.
  11. Sharing of Items: It is important to remind everyone that the items are shared. And that we want people to collaborate on the items.
  12. Encourage involvement: Remain present for who may be quiet. Use the whisper feature to draw people into the conversations.

Speed Boat Game Lobby Facilitation Script

Thank you and welcome to the game. This will be an online experience, so please leverage the chat windows as you would your voice for today’s retrospective.

My name is , and I’ll be your facilitator.

Retrospectives are an important practice of Agile. The goal of a retrospective is to give the team an opportunity to reflect on their work and work processes in order to retain and/or expand what is working best while identifying further opportunities for improvement.

The time scope of this retrospective is the last 6 months or last release, whichever is longer.

The process scope is the complete development process from story creation, through development and into production deployment (release to customer).

When we start the game, you’ll see a main window that has a picture of a Speed Boat with some anchors and propeller icons to the upper left.

The anchors represent impediments. These are anything that you think might slow down your ability to create and deliver extraordinary products.

The propellers represent things that are going well. We want to keep these – and share them!

Your job is to drag the anchors and propellers from the top left onto the boat where you think they should be placed. The worse the anchor, the lower it should be placed. The better the propeller, the higher it should be placed.

Since everyone shares the same set of items, you will need to collaborate with your fellow players on the placement of items.

This collaboration exercise really works best when you resist the urge to multi-task. Other groups have produced some really interesting ideas when they focused and discussed them via chat.

Any questions so far?

To help you negotiate we have two chat windows. The first is the large chat window I’m using right now. Chats in this window are public – everyone sees them. The smaller window is below the big chat window, with a pull-down menu of player names to the right. This allows you to send a chat directly to another player – which is very helpful when negotiating the placement or meaning of icons.

My job is to answer your questions during the game and help move things along.

To ensure the best results, we’d like to emphasize a few additional points.

While we encourage vigorous debate, we’d like you to remain respectful of your fellow employees.

When negotiating, try to explain clearly the impact or benefit of the items you’ve placed on the board.

Oh – one more thing. Once the game starts our system will automatically email you a link to rejoin the game if you should become accidentally disconnected. This happens rarely, but, if you get disconnected, simply check your email and rejoin the game.

We’ll start when everyone is ready. Are we ready?

Speed Boat Game Facilitation Notes

  • When an anchor is placed on the game board, try to find out if other players experience the same anchor.
  • Do the players agree on the placement of the anchors?
  • Once the game is underway you may find it helpful to explicitly present and discuss the layers and regions.

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