3 little pigs for a retrospective

I am currently supporting a client whose team uses the Kanban method to manage its maintenance flow. This choice started from a presentation that I had made to the managers of the spirit of the approach and some practices to be implemented to get started.

After a few months of use, I was asked to take stock with the team (whom I had not had the opportunity to meet before) in order to see what their impressions were of this implementation. . After thinking about the workshop to offer them, I decided to go with a structure including a retrospective of the 3 little pigs that I present to you here.

Note: my drawing skills are particularly limited, unfortunately you will not see any pigs or wolves! 😛

Happy reading ! 🙂

Unrolled

As you can see, I decided not to just focus on the current implementation but to see in a more general way what their working situation looked like:

• Challenges : to understand where the team comes from and if they are aware of it.

• Vision : to allow the team to express its voice and to see potential avenues for improvement.
• Retrospective : to take stock of the current situation
• Debriefing : to share around the workshop, to give meaning to the practices in place today and which would not be well understood and to give some perspectives.

This should give me a good idea of the relevance of the Kanban approach to the issues that will be raised by the team! 😉

Challenges

In this part, I asked the team to describe the challenges they had to face until today and to materialize them in the form of Post-it notes. I told them that these problems could have been resolved but I thought that what would emerge would rather correspond to what is still relevant anyway.

Unsurprisingly, we can see that the subject that is most often mentioned revolves around the continuous prioritization, emergency management and therefore of thework organization. I then tell myself that the Kanban approach should be a good way to move forward on this.

Now, to my great surprise, I realize that documentation issues are also very present: documentation in the sense of need description (knowing what you want to do) and documentation in the sense of solution description (how it works) .

Vision / Horizon

Following the evocation of the challenges of the team, place to the desired future! 🙂

I suggest that everyone describe on Post-its their vision of their ideal work environment, of the horizon to be reached. The vision/horizon distinction may appear subtle, but depending on the person, the choice of words may have a different impact. The important thing for me was to help the team formulate sentences like:

In my ideal future, such a thing is true.

After explaining the challenges and the ideal future, it was time to analyze the current situation. This is where our 3 little pigs will be able to play their role!

Before starting, I then ask each person to write at least a post-it entitled “Kanban” in order to have their feelings on this implementation. I describe each house (as below) and ask everyone to process the 3 houses at once for the sake of efficiency.

straw house

Here is the instruction given to the participants:

What are you doing today that could crumble in a gust of wind?

Result :

I found it interesting to see some elements related to priority here, which is completely consistent with the current problem of managing the team's work.

There are several “Kanban” tickets in this category, which could appear alarming. However, the precision made by some people on the Daily Kanban has made it possible to highlight that the problem mainly revolved around a lack of organization.

Indeed, it turns out that the Daily Kanban mentioned corresponds to a Daily organized around a maintenance flow that concentrates people from several departments. The difficulty compared to a Daily from the same team is that the availability of people is variable and that the presence of everyone is not necessarily required each time.

The problem that seems interesting to me then to study is perhaps not at the level of the animation of the Daily Kanban (even if that can always help) but at the level of the structure of the teams around the treatment of this maintenance flow .

Wooden house

Here is the instruction given to the participants:

What are you doing today that holds up but deserves consolidation?

Result :

Post-it Kanban appear here in a number almost equivalent to the previous category, which is encouraging. Indeed, the Stop Starting, Start Finishing mechanism has paid off and has reduced the stock of tickets by almost 50% in the space of 2 months! 🙂

However, it seems important to me to go a little further in the process by setting up limits in the flow itself as well rather than blocking only the input, even if that was already a good start!

brick house

Here is the instruction given to the participants:

What are you doing today that is solid, reliable and that you are satisfied with?

Result :

Unsurprisingly, the last category was not very successful. Is it because we can always consider that things can be improved or that we can never be satisfied with what we have? I do not really know. However, I think that in some teams, it can allow us to act together on the things that work well and that deserve not to be forgotten.

In a usual retrospective, we would like to prioritize and select subjects afterwards in order to put actions in place. Since this was not the subject of the workshop, I did not do it! 🙂

Conclusion

I find this format of retrospective interesting for the angle taken by the metaphor of the different houses that I have rarely found elsewhere. In the end, it works rather well for an inventory by classifying the practices implemented according to 3 axes.

Combined with a bit of solution focus, I think the workshop was able to highlight expectations, goals and the current situation in a fairly clear and natural way.

I invite you to test it (if you haven't already) and tell me what you think 🙂