Best Practice – Make Retrospective Action Items Highly Visible

Here is how I define a Best Practice:

• Best Practice -a practice that is good in almost all contexts and almost all team situations.
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Many teams talk a good game on making changes to their development process, but fewer actually make those changes. Therefore, it is a Scrum Best Practice to make Retrospective action items highly visible to the team, usually on or very near the Scrum Board.

The visibility technique employed will be highly dependent on the team. Consider some of the following methods, or come up with your own!

• List them in big letters on a Scrum Board
• Create Sprint Backlog Tasks for action items and make sure they get to “done”.
• Do this: Best Practice – Review the Action Items from the Previous Retro in the Current Retro
• On certain days (Like Mon/Wed/Fri, Tue/Thurs, even, odd, every day, etc) in the Daily Scrum, have a team member pick a retro action item to talk about and have them talk for 30-60 seconds(time-box) about the action item. They can talk about the state of the item(announce completion!), why the item is important, give the person who came up with it or completed it praise, or even something like what life will be like once that action item is completed.
• On random days, offer a prize for anyone who can list a retrospective action item that is supposed to be completed in the current sprint. The prize can be very small or token, maybe as simple as candy or another desirable treat.