Reflecting on completed work is arguably the single most important thing that any team can do for continuous improvement. It is essential to understand the nature of your performance, before you can make the right adjustments to improve the next time. Retrospectives help individuals and team members to learn and improve. Some sprints ago, my team and I started experimenting with some different Retrospectives formats. I would like sharing with you one of them.

SWOT is a technique for Retrospectives.

Use it when you want to… allow teams to examine multiple aspects of a sprint or in general of an event, to form original ideas on how it can be improved .

Length of time: Depending on the size of the team, 90 minutes should be enough.

How it works: Introduce the Retrospective by drawing a large 2×2 SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) matrix.

First ask the team to think back about the current sprint/event and what items were Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Give the team enough time (e.g. 10 minutes) to come up with ideas and position each post-it (ideally one item per post-it) in the related SWOT category.

Group any related items and discuss as one team.

After a Brainstorming session, discuss the novelty, feasibility, and impact of the ideas, and collaborate to analyze how define actions to be applied to the next sprint.

Vote on the most important actions to take forward.

Here is the finished output of our Retrospective:

If you like you can find more techniques in my e-Book: leanpub.com/retrospectivesworkout