After Action Review
I am reading a book by John Lee Dumas called The Common Path to Uncommon Success. If you are interested in a successful career blogging or podcasting, I highly recommend his book. One of the things John talks about is the AAR, or After Action Review. It’s a tool he learned in the army to review combat situations to learn and improve from real situations. He adopts this technique into his success routine, conducting an AAR once a month to review accomplishments and find opportunities for improvement. If it sounds a lot like a Sprint Review and Retrospective, it is.
John uses some specific questions though that may be helpful in structuring your Reviews and Retrospectives. He has twelve questions that he answers every month related to a project or projects that he has been working on. These are slightly different from Sprints, but I think the questions could apply:
What was the goal of this project? For Scrum for Your Life, you may have multiple goals in a Sprint, but you could answer this for each, or take a broader view of your entire Sprint.
Did I accomplish the goal? We record this in our Sprint Review.
What went well? This is a Retrospective question.
What went poorly? Also a Retrospective question.
What did I learn from this project/sprint?
Does this project align with the core values of my business? Theoretically, we should never need to ask this question because no goal should show up in a Sprint that isn’t already aligned with your values. Values do change though, and if you notice that it’s time to reevaluate.
Will I do something like this again?
What would I do differently next time?
What systems and processes can I put in place to improve execution? This is a great Retrospective question.
Is this a project (task) I need to dedicate my personal time to or can I delegate it to someone on my team (or add a team member)?
What specific value did this add to my business? I would reword this to how did this task align with my values?
Who else is doing projects like this that I can study and learn from? John is a strong advocate of mentorships.
I invite you to use these questions in your next Review and Retrospective. Please let me know if you find them helpful, or if you have other questions you use to structure these ceremonies.