I’m a big fan of retrospectives for teams. Retrospectives smooth out bumps in your team’s environment and it gives everyone a sense they’ve had a chance to air their gripes – or offer up praises, even!
Retrospectives for remote teams can be tough, simply because so much value for retrospectives is gained through the interaction of folks in a room. At Telligent the team I’m on is four guys scattered between Ohio and Florida. While I’d really like an excuse to travel down to see Sean near Jacksonville, that won’t quite work.
At yesterday’s retrospective we gave a shot at using Twiddla as a retrospective board. Twiddla, coupled with Tokbox for video/audio, turned out to be a great no-friction solution as a place to put our Good/Bad/Confusing topics. It was also stupid easy to move those topics around as we did our organization phase.
The red/yellow/green dots were my addition after we’d moved and voted on things – I realized that we didn’t have a way to remember which topics were in which category. (Green for good/Red for bad/Yellow for confusing) I think next retrospective we’ll simply preface each topic with G/B/C to keep those straight.
We had a great retrospective, and it was in part because we found a tool that didn’t get in the way. Low-friction, usable tools, FTW!
2 comments:
Many thanks for checking out Tokbox.com. Please let me know if you have any feedback for the service.
@damon: Thanks for your comment. We've used Tokbox across our entire organization for quite some time. Stability of clients continues to be an issue, to the point of using Skype whenever possible if it's only two folks talking.
I hope you can overcome those challenges!
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