A variant of ROTI

Photo by Felix Russell-Saw on Unsplash

You know the principle of ROTI (Return On Time Invested) ? That end-of-meeting activity to get feedback and drive continuous improvement? Do you find it effective?

It was when accompanying a team where I was asked to attend a Sprint Planning that I said to myself that rather than simply telling them what I had thought of it, I was going to ask them their opinion first. ROTI seemed like an option to me, but I wanted to try something else and was quite surprised with the result.

I tried this new idea during a retrospective: I share with you what happened in this article! 🙂

Why I don't like ROTI (too much)

Like any tool, what matters is how it is used.

So far I agree.

It just turns out that most of the time, when I had to experience a ROTI, whether as a facilitator or as a participant, I found the following patterns:

• No one puts 1
  • Because we don't want to offend the person too much
  • 'Cause we don't want to have to explain it later

• Nobody puts 5
  • Because nothing is perfect and there is always something to improve

• By default, we put 3
  • Because we don't have too many opinions, so we hit the middle

• At best, we put 4
  • To not be bothered to have to explain it because since nobody puts 5, it will probably be part of the highest scores

• Only 2 left
  • If we want to spoil the atmosphere by saying everything that we didn't like during the meeting

Of course, I caricature.

But the culture of feedback is not always easy to implement and I find that the Perfect Game seems more appropriate in this type of situation because it explains clear rules in terms of structuring feedback and suggestions for improvement.

The ROTI, on the other hand, can often fall into gratuitous criticism where the participant only expresses himself as a consumer and not an actor in the situation. In this case, it is difficult to obtain real actionable feedback.

Ex: it was too hot/cold, we didn't make progress, it was too long...

The main problem in my opinion is the fact of relying only on numerical notation, which is sometimes a little cold, non-committal and not always representative of how one may have experienced the moment. Maybe a little emotional touch wouldn't hurt 🙂

But again:

Like any tool, what matters is how it is used.

Proposal and experimentation

During a retrospective, I asked the members of a team to evaluate the state of their cooperation.

To do this, I invited them to give me 2 things:

• A qualifying adjective : describing their current feelings
• A number between 1 and 10: describing their current satisfaction

After a few minutes of individual reflection, I gather everyone's answers on a board.

Here is the result obtained:

What I find interesting in this approach is that it is not mandatory that the adjective supports the note and vice versa which can lead to interesting conversations.

The adjective gives an immediate aspect to the questioning, that is to say that if the same question were asked the next day, the adjective could be different and it does not matter.

Some explanations of these results:

• Irreconcilable, 5 : "cooperation no longer appears as an objective in itself but it's ok for me, I accepted it"
• Good, 8 : “nothing to say, everything is fine”
• Reduced, 7 : “Interactions between team members are reduced due to each person's specializations, but I think it works pretty well”
• Not propelling, 5 : “the team dynamic is not very stimulating, but I accept it and deal with it”
• Bushy, 6 : “There are a lot of things to do and so we each have our heads a little underwater. We can do better but it's ok for me”

To give some context, the manager of this team had asked me for support in mode Agile Rocket on the Cooperate Module : the initial objective of this approach being to transform a sum of individuals into a collective that makes better decisions together.

After a few months of experimentation and seeing the results emerging from the retrospective, it is clear that people's perception was not at all the same. Now, that didn't seem to particularly surprise them. The team then realized that seeking cooperation between all team members all the time was not necessarily relevant.

We were then able to approach the notion of team and ad hoc taskforces to understand the difference in the cooperation mechanism in these 2 systems.

Conclusion

I found this exchange-generating alternative very interesting. Indeed, the search for the adjective is not an easy task but to go through a bit of the emotional could finally give way to deeper topics that had not managed to come out previously.

Now, keep in mind that adding an adjective is a way to generate conversation, so it'll probably work best if you've set aside some time to chat. Nevertheless, this format is simple and quick to implement. The job is simply to facilitate trade.

Going as precisely as possible, at the right time, in the right way, isn't that what we are looking for in Agility? 🙂