To continue to gain the benefits of Agility at Scale, organizations must move beyond traditional, in-person retrospectives focused on making individual teams great and towards low-cost, online retrospectives focused on making organizations great. Innovation Games® Online provides a low-cost, efficient, massively scalable and extremely high-impact collaboration platform upon which organizations product Large Distributed Team Retrospectives.

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Large Distributed Team
Retrospectives
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 1
See also: http://www.innovationgames.com/2014/06/how-to-run-huge-retrospectives/

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About Conteneo
Conteneo is a
Collaboration Amplification company.
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 2
Grounded in the science of play,
our enterprise software and
professional services merge
serious games, domain expertise
and collaboration leadership to
super power teams to achieve
Epic Wins.

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Retrospecting Retrospectives
+ Δ

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Retrospective Outcomes / Impact
What is the impact or outcome over time?
Augment your graph with specific changes you’ve
made.
time
impact
low
high

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Retrospective Outcomes / Impact
time
Impact /
Benefit
high
low
Early
Adoption
Team
Maturation
Organizational
Limits
Why
Bother?

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Exploring Your Frame
What was the “scope” when you answered this
question? (e.g., a single team or ?)

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Design Challenge
Design an effective retrospective for 30 Scrum
teams in three locations.
Constraints: You do not have enough budget to fly
everyone to the same location.

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Agenda
• Motivations for Enterprise Retrospectives
• Process Overview
• Expected Results
• Expect Actions

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You have
many Agile
teams.
To improve performance of the enterprise you need
to conduct an enterprise retrospective – not just
one team – but every team.
Improving Enterprise Performance

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Traditional retrospectives
focus on a single, co-located
team.
They can produce results that
improve the performance of
the team, but often fail to
address the needs of the
enterprise – the issues
affecting multiple teams or
beyond the scope of control
of any single team.
Single Team Retrospectives
Image Credit: http://www.cornetdesign.com/images/AgileRetrospectives_134B2/IMG_0016.jpg

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Collaboration is…
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Pretty easy
for small teams…
Pretty hard
for large distributed teams!

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Collaboration is Hard for Large Teams Because
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Serious Games
that Amplify
Collaboration.• Meetings
• Email threads
• Video conferencing
• Surveys
Success
We mistake communication
for collaboration!

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Games are the Ideal Collaboration Tool!
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Goals Constraints Rules Voluntary
Participation

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Conteneo’s Games Scale to Large Teams
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San José, CA Budget Games

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We Need Online Retrospectives
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Speed Boat is a well-known
retrospective technique in
which teams collaboratively
identify the anchors slowing
them down.
Playing Speed Boat online
and at scale, we can
efficiently conduct an
Enterprise Retrospective.
The result? An Epic Win!

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Setting Scope
We have found success in setting scope as follows:
Time Scope: Last 6 months or last release,
whichever is greater
Process Scope: The complete development
process from story creation, through development
and into production deployment (release to
customer).
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 16

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Step 1: Identify the Teams
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We identify
the teams
and the
facilitators.

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Step 2: Conduct Retrospectives
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We schedule and
conduct online
retrospectives
using Speed Boat.
Anchor: Impediment
Propeller: Good Stuff
Placement indicates
how bad or how good.
The number of items
is shared among all
players.
Good
Really Good
Somewhat Bad
Bad
Really Bad

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Step 3: Analyzing Results
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We download the results of all
games to categorize each of
the ideas.
Categorize Each Idea
Create Project
Describe Features,
Benefits and
Price
Team & Enterprise Projects

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Categorize: People, Process, Technology
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People
Tools /
Technology
Process
“We should
use GitHub”
“My PO doesn't attend
planning meetings”
“We aren’t clear on the
meaning of Done, Done”

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Categorize: Scope of Control
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“We should use GitHub”
“My PO doesn't attend
planning meetings”
“We aren’t clear on the
meaning of Done, Done”
We use Diana Larsen’s Circles
and Soup framework to help
analyze results. This helps
This is also an excellent online
retrospective tool!
www.innovationgames.com/circles-and-soup

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Scope vs. PPT Scatter Plot
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Teams identified positive
and negative feedback
about evenly.
Significant
opportunities for highly
impactful
improvements.

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Keep Doing Good Stuff – Address Oppty

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Creating Projects
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We create projects to address the impediments.
Entire
project
list.
Team
projects.
Enterprise
projects.

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Selecting Projects
• Management reviews our results.
• Projects are selected and engaged.
• Some projects may be just “approved”.
• We may play additional Innovation Games® such as
Buy a Feature to help in the selection of the projects.
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 25

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Sharing Results
• Results are shared with the team members.
• This may be through
• Senior Leaders
• Scrum Masters
• We want the participants to know they’ve been
heard and that we’ll be acting on the results.
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 26

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Time Estimates
© Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 27
Planning / Goal Setting
2-3 weeks
Game Play
1 week
Post-Processing
2-3 weeks
Projects? 1- 5 months

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Luke Hohmann
Founder & CEO, Conteneo, Inc.
480 San Antonio Road, Suite 202
Mountain View, CA 94040
mobile: (408) 529-0319
luke.hohmann@conteneo.co