Description of the workshop

The Value of Events Retrospective is a workshop designed to help Scrum team members align on the purpose and format of Scrum events such as Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and the Refinement activity. 

This workshop is particularly useful when, as a Scrum Master, you notice that team members have not yet acquired a satisfactory Scrum culture or that their engagement is not optimal during certain events. It allows you to question the format of each event, so as to best adapt it to the expectations of the team.

The workshop includes an icebreaker, a correspondence matrix between events and their content, an event rating scale, and a table for defining improvement actions.

How to run The Value of Events Retrospective

The workshop takes place in 4 steps:

Step 1: Ice breaker

The workshop starts with an icebreaker in which team members are asked to share their latest reading.

Step 2: Remind what the Scrum events and the refinement activity are about

During the second part of the workshop, participants engage in collaborative learning to discuss the objectives and format of each event. The following questions guide the discussion:

  • What is the objective of the event?
  • What will be inspected? (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, market context, tools and processes, etc.)
  • What changes will be made based on the inspection result?
  • Who will be affected by the event?

The main goal of this exercise is to bring the team members together and foster a shared understanding of the nature of each event.

Step 3: Evaluate your events and your refinement activity

During the third step of the Scrum framework, participants are required to evaluate the value that each of their Scrum events provides on a scale of 0 to 5. They are also encouraged to share a comment that explains their rating. 

After all the participants have shared their views, you can calculate the average rating for each event. This will help you prioritize which event(s) to improve first.

Step 4: Define improvement actions

After selecting the event(s) that needs improvement, the team brainstorms on possible actions to take. To facilitate the brainstorming process, the team can make use of techniques such as Lean Coffee or 1-2-4-All.

For each improvement action chosen, the team must specify the event it pertains to, define the Definition of Done, identify someone who will take ownership of it, and establish a deadline.