What is a DAKI retrospective?

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A DAKI retrospective helps you identify specific features, behaviors or activities that people in your project team think they should Drop, Add, Keep or Improve. This type of retrospective identifies differences in perceived values of each person in the team. It is a great way to re-energize the team and to gain new insights by having the team question the value from current practices and to refine them.

The DAKI retrospective is best used later on in the project life cycle as there has been enough time passed to allow the team to reflect on the progress to date overall. As a prioritization method, it helps the team cull out non-value activities and re-affirms those that are.

The Agile Retrospective Questions

Drop – These could be anything that is distracting the team from project outcomes, to time wasting activities. The goal is that as these activities transition out, the value to the project should increase.

Add – As new challenges arise during the course of the project, innovation is required to overcome this. These are things that the team now believe should be added to what they do to replace the things that have been dropped. This may be something technical, a process, a resource or even a new process.

Keep – These acts as the forget-me-not list that reminds the team of what needs to continue to happen in order to ensure the project is a success.

Improve – Finally, there might be some activities that are already happening, but with a little tweak could increase it’s impact. This is a space for incremental changes and evolution to refine the way the team works.

This style of retrospective can be used to refine product features through to communication patterns within the team. You can use the topics as themes, as opposed to being too narrow in terms of it’s focus.

How to run a DAKI retrospective in TeamRetro

Start your DAKI retrospective with a click
Log into TeamRetro and choose the DAKI Retrospective template.

Invite your team easily – no separate accounts needed

Send an email invite, a link or add to your slack channel to get people started quickly. SSO options are also available.

Time to brainstorm

Each team member can now brainstorm individually under each topic. This avoid group think and allows everyone to have their say. They can indicate when they have finished, or you can set a timer so that you know when to move onto the next stage.

Group ideas faster

Drag and drop related ideas to combine them for easier voting. TeamRetro can also automatically suggest ideas that are similar, saving you and your team valuable time.

Vote independently to avoid anchoring

Each team member votes on what they would most like to discuss further. The results won’t be displayed to everyone until you advance to Discuss.

Discuss the most important things first
You and your team discuss the top voted ideas and create actions for continuous improvement. Presentation mode allows you to walk your team through ideas one-by-one and keeps the conversation focused.

Review and create actions

Easily facilitate discussion by bringing everyone onto the same page. Create action items, assign owners and due dates that will carry through for review at the next retrospective.

Share the results
Once you have finished your retro, you can share the results and actions with the team. Your retro will be stored in history so you can revisit them as needed.

Congratulations! You’ve just run a retro like a boss.

Want more? Read on.

Ideas and tips for your DAKI retrospectives

Use the concepts of brain writing – give people “silent time” to write, read and respond to each topic. You can even open up your retrospective before your meeting to allow people to add ideas and concepts prior to the meeting.
Use the way teams vote to manage culture. You’ll get interesting insights when people add ideas and votes. Too much in the drop column may indicate an over zealous scope. Too much in the keep and nothing in the add or improve columns signals a need for innovation or creativity.
A thank you goes a long way. Give a shout out to the team at the end of the meeting.
In face to face meetings, doing things digitally allows you to collect ideas, vote and comment anonymously, and saves manual collation. If running your meeting digitally, use a video conferencing tool to give that personal touch.
Rotate the role of facilitator. Changing the role can break the routine.

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