When a team grows is important to not forget the values of the team and the company. This could be worse if the team is also starting to forget to talk about problems in retrospectives and is focused into discuss solutions.
There are a lot of techniques to work on this kind of problems, but in this article I’m going to explain a retrospective exercise that Pablo Bouzada and I designed, totally inspired by this talk from Maria Berenguer — (Spanish) Mis retrospectivas se han roto and our experience in other retrospectives.
Introduction to the retrospective
First, the facilitator has to prepare the room for the exercise, will prepare a paper or notebook for each teammate and a pen for each of them. Will also take some markers to share with the team and write The Prime Directive (translations) in the board.
Exercise 1: Company values
By turns, each teammate explain a value that she or he knows about the company, related to how we work in the projects during the sprints. Some examples can be:
- Deliver good functional quality.
- Do pair programming at least a 50% of the time.
- Help teammates.
The facilitator is going to add all these ideas (and some more if is necessary) to the board.
After there is a list with the most important values, the team has to decide and discuss which of this value are representing they as a team.
This will help to understand how far or close is the team to the values that the company represents.
Discuss why the team is not close to some of these values, and check if the team believe in them and why.
Exercise 2: Distance to the core
Let’s see how much far are all of us to the Core of the team. The Core?
Yes…
