Category: Tools

I’ve taken part in something a little different for me recently called fishbowl conversations. People more articulate than me can explain it alot better so I’ve included a link below but effectively you have 5 chairs in a circle, 4 people sat down and a spare seat. The people sat down discuss the topics and if anyone not sat down wants to take part they must sit down as you can only listen on the outside. When the 5th seat is taken someone else must stand up so there are always only 4 people sat and taking part in the talking.

http://www.funretrospectives.com/fishbowl-conversation/

I found it was a good way to get people up off their seats and moving around, might be good for after lunch when people are feeling lethargic – could also fall flat on its face because no one wants to move!

Over the last few months I’ve been able to see a few different websites utilised during retros:

https://www.sli.do this site allows you to do Q and A’s, word clouds, voting up and down popular topics, polls and much more. Features free options and paid plans.

https://funretro.io/ allows you to create boards for mad, sad, glad (for example) and the team can add cards to each column, vote up or down add comments and more. I’ve not seen this one used as much but its definately something to look in to. Free options and paid for plans.

Retrospectives tend to follow the same format whereever I go and involve alot of post-it notes.

I was in one today where https://www.mentimeter.com/ was used and its definately a site I wish to use in the future. Essentially for free you can setup a single question and allow participants to answer the question via their phones, laptops or whatever by going to a URL and typing in a 6 digit number.

A screen can then be used to show the result in different formats, for instance I saw the answers appearing as a word cloud for one question and as post-it notes appearing on a board for another.

Highly recommend this to bring something different to your meetings especially if wall space is limited.

An agile tool I like to use is explained a lot better than I could do myself in the link below.

In short its for identifying what awesome would look like for whatever you are trying to achieve and writing incremental tasks to work towards it.

Ultimately you may never get to awesome but you should try to get as close as possible while still gaining benefit for the amount of effort involved in the incremental change.

At some point it won’t be worth going for awesome as you’ll be as close as you need without needing to spend a huge amount of money for instance.

The reason I’m posting this is once again in case its useful for others but actually I regularly lose this link and will hopefully find it easier by posting it here!

https://blog.crisp.se/2013/05/14/jimmyjanlen/improvement-theme-simple-and-practical-toyota-kata