Effective Retro Actions

​​ Of all the aspects of agile ceremonies, I think the process of gathering effective retro actions is one of the most tricky aspects.

Here’s some pointers that might help if you are aren’t getting the most from yours.

Have an owner
Can you change your action to ensure there is an owner. “Collectively responsibility” often ends up meaning “no ones responsiblity”. An example of this could be “The whole team to provide time spent using an IDE statistic” to “Person x to collate time spent in IDE statistic from the team”

Make them getting the wheels in motion
If an action is massive you are less likely to get a willing owner and it’s less likely to be completed (especially before your next retro). A good example of changing them could be an old one of ours. “Person x to create a vagrant box that can be reused by all developers with all the bells and whistles”. If this was changed too “Person x to raise a environment consistency story and prioritise it on the backlog” then it probably would’ve been done

Share them
Making sure people see the retro actions after leaving the room improves completion rate. If the first time anyone sees the action again is in the next retro lots get forgotten

Check back to make sure they are done
At the atart of your retro go through the actions from last retro. If they consistently get lost or forgotten then the benefit is being lost but so is peoples confidence in the process

Be realistic
If you have 1,452 retro items try to pick the most important. If Joe Bloggs has 15 I bet they wont finish them. There’s many wacky ways such as sitting people who own actions in a limited number of chairs at the front of the ceremony and only assigning a new item if you let someone else vacate a chair. I think a conversation normally suffices though

Escalate
Finally, you shouldn’t assign actions to anyone not present, but some retro actions may not be something the team can resolve. If you can’t make this the case then be sure to escalate the item, chase it up and report on its status until complete

Hope this helps