What Went Right What Went Wrong Template

What Went Well Retrospective

A lightweight retrospective template that focuses on outcomes

What is a What Went Well retrospective?

Not all retrospectives need a circuitous retrospective template. A What Went Well retrospective helps scrum teams focus on how they felt they performed during a sprint. With but two prompts, it offers a not bad way of streamlining your retrospective meeting, boosting team member cocky-esteem, and diagnosing hurting points.

The What Went Well format is based on Dr. Martin Seligman's work on positive psychology. Seligman suggested that people create a listing every solar day of three things that went well every bit a gratitude and coping practise. The concept has been adopted by software development teams and agile practitioners for sprint retrospectives.

What went well: This is the saucepan for everything that helped you achieve your sprint issue. Talk about the activity itself in binaries. A affair either worked or didn't. So what practices did y'all excel at as a team. These will be all the things you'll want to consider doubling down on in your next dart or next iteration. It's also a skilful opportunity to share some positivity and some kudos with the squad.

Instance: "Changing to asynchronous stand-ups instead of live meetings"

What didn't become well: This is the bucket for activities that didn't work for the sprint outcome. Perhaps y'all tried something for the kickoff time and it just wasn't upward to scratch. Maybe a rogue result damaged your action program or workflow for the sprint. This column will include the items you either divest or flag for prioritization so they tin exist improved.

Example: "The new bug triage process"

The goal of a What Went Well retrospective is to focus the conversation on actions taken and to purposefully narrow the scope of inquiry to the extremes of things either going well or not going well. Later dot voting the most important issues to hash out and speaking about them as a squad, you should go away from this retrospective with articulate action items for the next sprint.

Traditionally a What Went Well retrospective would exist done on a whiteboard with sticky notes. If you're a remote-showtime or hybrid team, you tin use an online tool like Parabol to help you reflect on piece of work and organize your thoughts on what went well and what didn't, into themes.

When to do a What Went Well retrospective

What Went Well retrospectives are helpful in a few different scenarios:

When you want to focus on outcomes over feelings: The construction of the retrospective only asks you lot to bespeak out what worked and what didn't, not how yous felt nigh it.

When you want a post-mortem style retrospective: If yous have a specific product or project that you want to look back on, this retrospective template helps focus everyone's mind on the activities that served you vs. the activities that didn't.

When you lot want a lightweight retrospective: What Went Well retrospectives keep everything simple, only still let you to have a broad-ranging conversation. This means they may require more work from a facilitator to guide the conversation, simply with the added value of being able to deliver continuous improvement in a more directly style.

How to run a What Went Well retrospective with Parabol

Select Retro Meeting with the arrows, and so use the dropdown to select theWhat Went Well retro template.

The icebreaker box is checked on by default. You don't have to do one, but we recommend it. They offer a chance to break the ice and get everyone in a chatty mood that encourages agile participation.

When yous've fabricated your choices, hit thatStart Meeting to kick things off!

If you're doing an icebreaker, you'll take a random question to answer. You lot can refresh information technology if you want another option, or create your own. Perchance almost a contempo thing that went well in your personal life!

After the icebreaker you'll motion on to the reflect stage. This is where you get into the principles of the What Went Well retro.

Retrieve, Parabol is remote-friendly, enabling y'all to work asynchronously with your team. They can all leave comments together, or practise it at a time that works for them.

Also, reflections are anonymous, and no one can run into them until you're done working on them. Later on the reflect phase, you'll vote on problems to discuss, talk about the most voted on items, and and so get a summary of the retro when yous're done.

Agile is Better with Parabol

Save meeting prep time, get everyone talking and evolve as a team – all in one tool. Parabol is free for upward to two teams. Yup, totally complimentary. From Parabol with love.