Retrospektiven

This talk was by Jutta Eckstein and was about why and how you should run what we would call lessons learned meetings. In the Agile world, these are called Retrospectives, and should be run at the end of every iteration, or heartbeat (what the difference is, I'm not sure, but hey I am sure that there is one).

Frau Eckstein demonstrated by her command of the subject and the tone of her presentation that she really knew about what makes such a meeting tick. She started by talking about being non-judgemental and assuming that everyone is trying their best in the team and then she recommended trying to come up with some sort of success criteria (of what the meeting should achive) before the meeting. She gave a few tips about what to do in such a meetings (Time-lining, Human Sociogram), and recommened that the members should try and concentrate on a few action points afterwards, as opposed to many, because that increases the chance of changing something.

I asked her after the talk, whether she had seen any patterns of classic mistakes that teams make and she said that there will be a keynote speech about this subject later in the conference. That would be interesting, because I get the gut feeling that there are many teams making the same mistakes, and that there are probably some standard answers out there. If these became public knowledge and there were some pointers about how to avoid making these mistakes in the first place, then the overall productivity of the industry would be raised.