The concept of continual improvement is one of Scrum’s key concepts. During the Retrospective meeting of each Sprint, the Team goes through an inspect-and-adapt cycle. Aside from that, the Scrum Guide does not guide conducting a good retrospective or using the meeting to increase productivity and quality. That’s why running sprint retrospectives can be challenging. The retrospective can become obsolete and repetitive for the Team after a while. The question is, as Scrum Master, how can you prevent this from happening and having an effective retrospective? The answer is Kaizen.

What is Kaizen?

Kaizen (カイゼン) is a Japanese term meaning “change for the better” or “continuous improvement.” It is a concept referring to business activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees. The Kaizen is helpful in a wide range of industries. For more information about Kaizen, please check https://www.kaizen.com/

How to use Kaizen for effective sprint retrospectives?

Scrum emphasize continuous improvement for delivering value to stakeholders. On the other hand, the purpose of the retrospective is for developers to review how the work went during the previous Sprint to better solutions to accomplish Sprint’s goal(s). This implies that the Team should also discuss internal procedures. This is where we can use Kaizen.

In the retrospective meeting, developers must identify the single most significant impediment and eliminate it using Sprint. Put the top-priority major obstacle in the Sprint Backlog as a task with acceptance criteria(s) determining when it is done. The task is reviewed during the following Sprint Review to assess what improvement the process change has made.

Focusing on the most crucial obstacle will have the unintended consequence of the Team self-managing to remove other high-priority obstructions without losing sight of the most critical impediment. It’s crucial to make only one change. It will be challenging to determine which process modification solved the critical problem and improve performance if it tries to perform several changes. Scrum Team throughput will stall or reduce significantly if they do not keep improving. When the Team succeeds in boosting throughput or becoming more efficient, trust and transparency will increase after the impediment has been removed.

Reference

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