Card Of The Day: Actually Do Retrospective Actions

Our current Card Of The Day board at Eden

Retrospectives are something we’ve been doing regularly for quite a while at Eden, but we’ve hit a problem. It’s very easy to come up with a great list of actionable items, and then very easy never to look at them again. Don’t tell me you’ve never done this :)

We’ve started doing something slightly different at Eden to try and stop this happening: we’re using a method we’ve called Card Of The Day.

When the retrospective is finished, we take all of the cards with SMART action goals and put them on our company kanban board to ensure they’re done. Then we take all the cards that are a little more hazy (the sort of cards that say: “Be better at X”), we pin them up on the wall, and every morning after standup we read one out at random to the team.

Normally this has a “ahh, yes” effect on the team. Sometimes it generates a conversation, sometimes an action we hadn’t thought of yet and something else to go on the Backlog. There’s always something that comes out of it.

It’s not a perfect method, but it’s working better than the alternative: feeling guilty at the beginning of the next retrospective about all the terribly important things we haven’t done.

Have you tried something similar? Or do you have an alternative way to remember to do retrospective actions?