Sintrospective

The holy man is back in the country!

Do you want to be part of his club? What are the good and bad things Sinterklaas wrote about you in his Great Book? How can we, as a team, improve to get more presents from Sinterklaas next sprint?

It will all be answered in this Sintrospective.

Ingredients

• A (free) Mural account
• The mural template
• Internet-connected device for all participants
• Videocall software
• Your awesome team
• A good mood
• Trust

Retrospective (1h30)

Icebreaker: Who are you from the club of Sinterklaas? (20m)

A successful team consists of a diverse set of personalities. During this part of the Sintrospective, everyone in the team analyzes what personality they have that matches a member of the club of Sinterklaas.

The different personalities explained:

• Sinterklaas: The leader of the club
• Dancing Piet: The creative one of the club
• Cool Piet: the Team player, who has a good connection with everybody
• Test Piet: The 'try everything' Piet, who just tries things (sometimes before thinking)
• Music Piet: the communicator of the club
• Super Piet: the problem solver
• Bake Piet: the one who always thinks about food
• Rookie Piet: the junior of the club
• Knowledge Piet: The experienced one
• Slecht-Weer-Vandaag: The carrier of the club, who supports everyone

Now that everyone has chosen a personality from the list, we can ask the team some questions:

• Why did you pick a certain personality?
• Do we miss some personalities in our team?

This part of the Sintrospective helps the team build some trust, so that we can be more open with each other during the next part.

The Great Book (60min)

This is the part where we add topics and dive right in.

There are many ways to structure this retro. In this example, we divide the team over break-out rooms where these now smaller groups discuss the different topics for a set amount of time (e.g. 30min). After that, everyone returns to the big group, where they can share some topics from the breakout room with the whole team, so that those can further be discussed in the remaining time.

This retro is ideal when working remotely, but is just as much an option when in the office. Just print out the image below on a big piece of paper and get started! If you are working with break-out rooms, print it out as many times as necessary.

Sinterklaas has a Great Book in which he writes all things naughty and nice. In this book, we should also find everything good and bad about everyone in the team. By asking ourselves certain questions, we can reflect on what should be written down in the book (good & bad) and what we can do better next time to get even more presents from Sinterklaas.

We can ask ourselves the following questions:

• What good things about the team can we find in the Great Book? Whoever is sweet gets treats!
• What bad things about the team can we find in the book? If you're naughty, it won't be so nice!
• What should we do in the next sprint to make sure we get as many presents as possible from Sinterklaas?

By answering these questions, we can reflect on how we are doing as a team and what we can improve to get a better spot in the Great Book of Sinterklaas.

The bag (10min)

In this section, you bring up action points that your team committed to for the previous sprint and inspect them.

For every topic brought up in the previous retrospective, which are stored in the bag of Sinterklaas, we discuss whether we did this during the sprint or not, and if it is/was useful or not.

Here we can reflect whether it's worth taking some action points over to our new sprint, and if we think it's still useful.

Rate the Retro

Last, but not least, we rate the retro. Hopefully, this retro was a success for your team, which you can then see by the way they rated it.

Everyone gives the retro a rating by sticking a post-it note to the right number of tangerines. This indicates how they feel it went. Optionally, they can add feedback on the post-it to improve the next retrospective.They need to add a post-it to the amount of tangerines.

Follow-up

For most intents and purposes, your eventual board will contain a lot of info all over the place. Often, your team will already have a main location to place retrospective notes. Pay particular attention to the action points. Highlight them or put them in a separate section. Do not forget to follow up where necessary in your next retrospective and/or daily!

Credits to Jeroen De Jong for inspiration.