Retrospective features for facilitators

We know how important the facilitators role is to ensuring an effective retrospective with the team.

With this in mind, we have purpose built a range of features that are designed to assist the facilitator:

• understand the engagement and overall morale of the team
• keep the conversation focused and to time
• ensure the highest voted/most pressing issues are addressed first
• categorise retrospective items into distinct themes so they can understand trends

We're now going to show you where to find this functionality and how to use it.

Team Mood Survey

The Mood Survey is available for each retrospective board to understand the emotional state of the team and identify improvement opportunities to improve team morale.

Each team member can vote on the desired emoji which best expresses their feelings throughout the Scrum sprint / Kanban cycle. The happiness index is calculated by dividing the number of happy (😀 or 🙂) votes by the number of total votes and multiplying the results by 100.

Measuring happiness index can provide an indication of team’s well-being and we recommend using the Mood Survey for each retrospective.

Facilitator Tip

Understanding the team's overall happiness index leading into a retrospective helps you understand what level of energy to bring as a facilitator.

If a team had a low happiness index for a given sprint, you might decide to change up the order of retrospective items you discuss. For example, you might chose to start by acknowledging the difficulty of the sprint and prioritising the discussion around what didn't go so well and what can be improved for next time.

Learn more about the Team Mood Survey here

Timer

The Retrospective timer helps to manage and track your time while running a retrospective ceremony. You can time box certain parts of the retrospective to boost productivity and keep the retrospective on-track.

Facilitator Tip

The goal is to optimise retrospectives for optimal team engagement, not to fill an hour time slot in the calendar. To do this, Poll your team to understand:

• how long they're most engaged for during team meetings
• what time of day they're most engaged in team meetings
• what day of the week they're works best for scheduling team meetings

Once you have this information, use the timer in the retro to respect the team's time and ensure the conversation remains productive, and the most pressing issues or opportunities are being addressed.

Learn more about the Timer functionality here

Categories

You can add categories to retrospective items to identify similar themed items.

Categories allow you to theme up the types of retrospective items your team are raising so you can see where key improvement areas might exist within your team, or across teams.

Learn more about categories here

Focus

The Focus features enables you to view the retrospective board ordered by created date, number of reactions, or creator.

The feature also allows you to filter the retrospective items by categories.

This, along with the timer, ensures you are respecting the teams time and focusing on the most pressing retrospective issues first.

Learn more about the Focus feature here

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