The interview

Today i tried a new exercise for a retrospective. I name it the interview.
Setting: 1 team-member is interviewed by other team-members such that the interviewee wants to explain the sprint, process or something that needs to be discussed.

The point is that emotions and remarks from the interviewee should be captured as that is being used as input for the next exercise. Now in a small group you can assign a few people as a monitor group. while the others are taking the interview.

In this case the team was small so the interviewers also were assigned with the task of monitoring. As input for the interview i used the agile manifesto printed on small cards so each interviewer had to question the interviewee on this specific topic. After 5 minutes i would let the group rotate and thereby enabling everyone to once be the interviewee and interviewer.

The output was written on sticky notes so we could place them on a flap over later on.

The results: the quantity of the output was overwhelming. We had enough material to work on in deciding what to do and categorizing the items. Of course i was interested in the opinion of the team. Their remarks where that the technique for retrieving information was good, but the topics where to general for the sprint and therefor the topics where more suitable for a project retro.

Goals: Besides the obvious goal for this exercise was to retrieve information.
However i also had an hidden agenda.
First of all 1 wanted to make the team more familiar with the agile manifesto and
Secondly i wanted them to work together on their perspective on scrum.

So although i failed to do a retro for this sprint, i do feel the team learned something.