First Retrospective with New Team
Well today we had our first retrospective, a day before the end of our first sprint. I used the tried & true format of “What went well” followed by “what went not as well”. We scheduled an hour for the meeting.
As usual, people had a lot of trouble coming up with positive things to say, and not much trouble coming up with negative 
One person refused to write anything positive!
It came together pretty easily that the topic that concerned the most people was “requirements”, or rather the lack of them. There was a fair bit of conversation, which could easily have got out of hand. In fact, it did for a little bit when one person tried to hijack the meeting for a topic other than the one we agreed to talk about. I redirected that to another 1-on-1 meeting between the 2 of us later.
I tried to keep it in front of everyone that we wanted to come up with concrete actions that could be used to address the problems. This worked ok to keep the conversation on topic, but no-one really suggested any actions except for our manager. Being that she is the manager, no-one was seemed ready to contradict her suggestions. They were good enough action items though, so I went with the flow.
The organization is very document-centric, which bothers me. Rather than talk about ways that the developers could *pull* requirements through 1-on-1 conversations, there were a lot of suggestions on how we could better use email and documents on SharePoint. Ugh. I’ll have to live with the document-centric viewpoint for a while I think. The best I can probably hope for, short term, is to find ways to make the documents useful to the team.
In the end, we finished on time and came out with some actions that we are taking to address our requirements-concerns. Nobody was insulted or put off, and the team is fairly positive. I’m pretty happy with those results.
Sharepoint people love Sharepoint. Its like Ruby in that way. Good luck converting them to people-centricity
I think it will be easier than apparent.
J