3 Little pigs Retro for Distributed teams

Object of Play

Finding out new insights and points to improve by looking at the current solution in a way that guides thinking in very brittle to rock sloid components. This version is an adaptation of the 3 little pigs retrospective in the excellent Fun Retrospectives book (www.funretrospectives.com) . This online version is suited for distributed teams. The extra steps presented here are well suited to having team members interacting one on one.

Number of people

Small groups, as results are shared at the end of the game.

Duration

30’ to 1 hour depending on the group size

Tools

Skype for business / Google hangouts or other multi user video conference tool
Linoid.com : an online postit board, can be used freely (with ads)

How

Prepare the linoit board with 3 areas:

House of straw: what do we do that just about hangs together, but needs a lot of improvement?
Add an example..

House of sticks: what do we do that is pretty solid, but could be improved?

House of bricks: what do we do that is rock solid?
Add a sticky with A text : Proposals for improvement below

Introduction

Explain the game is about finding out weak components in the environment / process / solution. Give some examples to indicate where thinking should go like in the different parts :
•    “A house of straw in the process is the fact that the attendance to sprint reviews is too low”,
•     “A rock solid part of our solution is the distributed logging”
•    “A wooded hut in the environment is the good performance of the solution in the test environment, but we should test more with simultaneous users”

Opening Stage 10’

Ask everyone to add stickies to the different areas

Exploration Stage 20’

Ask team members to form teams of two. If the teams are from different areas, have teams with one of each area. Sometimes this needs some nudging, some cultures are really not used to select someone to interact with.
Ask each team to select a sticky of their choice and
•    Drag the sticky to the proposal for improvement area so that other users can see the sticky was moved and taken.
•    Have a separate skype meeting between the two of them, discussing the sticky and trying to find possible steps/ideas/insights about the problem.
Tell them they can take additional stickies if they have enough time.
Give them a precise time to return to rejoin the main skype session.

Closing Stage

Have each team present their stickies and possible ideas in turn.  Try to limit each team to 5 minutes while collecting ideas and possible follow up.