“Goal Race” retrospective activity

The year started and new goals where disclosed in one of the team I am working with. Brainstorm part-I was done and the team needs to meet again to finalize it and convert ideas in “stories”. So far, so good.

As coach, I was ask me myself what I could do to help the team to see the big picture of the first goal where the due date is in the the first quarter. After few readings, I ended in this page, and I decide to play that game in our last retrospective, I rename it “Goal Race” to adapt with my idea to help the team. At the end I respect the well defined 4 sections of this game:

• Fast team car: What have been making us move fast? (Green post-it)
• Parachute: What have been slowing us down?(Red post-it)
• Risk: What are the dangers ahead?  (Yellow post-it)
• Bridge Plan: What could we build to overcome such challenges? (Blue post-it)

This is a forward thinking exercise, with an eye on the past, as the author of this game said. We spent around 30-45 min talking and adding post-it to our “Goal Race” design. Here is one resume what the team got from this activity:

• Team is able to see a big picture of the next challenger.
• Team was able to review past experiences and flag possible issues and risk related to the goal.
• Team has ideas to overcome issues and risk on the fly.
• PO has a list of point to discuss with stakeholders and show the work of the team in this game.
• PO & stakeholder have all the info and flags to do a good homework and avoid overload the team and/or overestimate expectations.
• PO has a support tool to negotiate feature/time/complexity if  he needs it at any point.

Here is the final result of the game. It is already in the team’s wall:

As Coach/SM, I am so happy for the participation of the team in this activity. With this experience I am able to recommend this activity if you need to start to work in something new for few sprints (release, goals, etc). I am thinking also to include stakeholders in the future with this kind of activities. They could take advantage of the discussion generate with the full team, and the team could get show that sometimes easy goals could become big challengers.

I hope you find this experience useful and give it a tray. I am very interesting in your feedback and comments.

Thank you,

Omar Bermudez