This is a format of retrospective I first started using in around 2013 and still use it today to help teams understand their work and the system of work in more detail. It’s particularly useful for teams starting out with Kanban and can be used as not just a reflection point for the team, but one for coaching and learning. It’s fairly simple and doesn’t need a lot of preparation – you can just go with this on your next retrospective.
It’s called the campfire retrospective because essentially the team gather around the board like a campfire and tell stories. You look at the board and prompt with questions like “what’s going on here” and let the team tell the story. I also often ensure that key data such as lead time distribution / scatterplots are to the side of the board so we can discuss this in relation to the stories on the board. After telling a few stories and understanding some more of what’s going on, you can start to adjust your board right there in the retrospective. Here are some things you can look out for / prompt for:
- Does the workflow look correct or should we adjust it?
- How are the WiP limits going – do we need to adjust?
- How’s collaboration – are people helping each other to achieve better flow?
- Are any items blocked and what’s causing it?
- Are we seeing some key repeating dependencies?
- Are there any new work item types or classes of service emerging?
- Are the policies working or do we need to update them?
- What is the data telling you?
- Are recent changes working as you expected or do we need to adjust again?
- What are the customer expectations and interactions around the tickets?
There are so many things that you can look at and talk about around the Kanban campfire. Importantly, once you discuss these issues, you should look to make improvements. Some you can make straight away – for example to adjust the policy just do it there and then on the board. Others you might need to add a task to the board to track a larger improvement body of work.
This is a simple form of retrospective that often provides a great way for the team to collaborate and improve. Often they may start this with improving the system to help the team, but over time, you’ll find you can shift this to help them focus more on the customer outcomes with their Kanban system. The other thing that’s great about this is that you don’t need a permission to get started – you can just schedule this for your next retrospective and watch the team take ownership and leadership. Have you tried the Kanban campfire retrospective yet?