The Dreyfus model of learning shows us that people in the beginning of acquiring a skill need more specific guidance than someone that’s more advanced. The same basic idea is applicable to teams. So different teams have different levels of agile competence. One of the things a beginner team might not be very good at is understanding and living up to the prime directive. They have for so long been stuck in a blame-game mode, that trying to learn together is very difficult.
In contrast, a team with proficient agilists will probably work through personal differences and get to the root cause more efficiently.
If you are facilitating retrospectives for a team that’s just starting out using agile principles, you have to take this into consideration. A team just learning to cooperate effectively needs different retrospectives than a team that are well on their way. For a beginner team, the retrospective needs to be focused much more on these types of activities:
- Advance the thinking
- This is a meeting where the group learns together. The meeting could be about how and why we break down stories into tasks and what good “break downs” look like.
- Improve Communication
- This is when the group strengthen their working relationship by sharing feelings and/or dealing with interpersonal tension.
- Build community
- Here the focal point is to create a shared purpose, strengthen the bonds among people who work together, and generally boost morale.
A beginner team needs to focus on activities that lead to shared understanding and better cooperation, and doesn’t force the team to make decisions they are not really prepared to. They are not prepared to make these decisions on their own yet. Having them make difficult decisions to early will only lead to frustration and decisions that are not followed through.
It’s still important to make some real decisions in these meetings, so people aren’t scared away by all the touchy-feel stuff. Your job as facilitator is to keep the decisions that the team makes easy ones at first.