The stop start retrospective is an action-oriented retrospective style, generating an immediate list of potential actions the team can take to realise improved productivity.
- Stop – List ideas that are not delivering results or might be driving people a little crazy – such as unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Start – List ideas that the team should be doing but are not doing, innovative ideas worth discussing to address current problems.
As best practice, remember to set the stage and ensure that people are reminded that is not a process of blame, but for identifying areas for change. If you have run this retrospective method several times before, you should see greater fidelity of ideas. If there are recurring items, this should be a treated as a red flag.
Facilitation Tips
- Stop
- What is something on your to do list that you never get to?
- If we lost a person in our project team, what would we have to lose to still meet deadlines?
- What’s something that is driving you crazy?
- Start
- A new person has joined our project team. What would be a new task that they could be assigned?
- Our budget has now doubled. What should we do?
- Good news, our customer has extended our deadline. What’s something new we could include to delight them?
How to run a Stop Start retrospective in TeamRetro
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