Retrospective Activity

Went well, didn't go well

Standard Easy Popularity: 9

This activity:

Easy to follow
Focus on data gathering

Introduction

Great activity to gather data regarding a complete set of work or post-mortem on a completed work or incident. When explaining the activity please note to participants that they should stick to the facts and not making notes on personal behavior as this may lead to non-productive conclusions and actions.

What went well

What didn't go well

For the specific activity, the facilitator could use these points to describe the process:

The What went well column is for things that a team member or the whole team performed and had a positive outcome towards the goal.
The What didn't go well column is for things that a team member or the whole team performed and negatively affected the goal.

TIP

Onboarding the team to the selected activity is important for a successful meeting. To learn more on what's needed to onboard your team to a retrospective meeting, read here.

Tips & Tricks

Keep your focus on actual tasks and processes that worked out well or did not work well. The focus is no these actions and not the team feelings.

The focus of the activity is on what went well and what didn't, leaving no room for work and processes that helped the team but require improvements to be used in the future. If you are certain that there is a lot of work that either worked well or didn't, it's better to exclude any remarks on work that doesn't clearly belong to these two categories.

Popularity: 9

The "Went well, didn't go well" activity is very popular among Team O'clock teams. It seems that many teams trust this activity for their retrospectives.

Recap