Metail provides a yearly training budget for all employees consisting of both time and money, but we found that many employees were not making the most of this opportunity. We decided to look into why this is and work on increasing the uptake. One idea we had was around hackathons – pairing people together to do small hackathons together sounds more fun than just reading a book by yourself!

One-to-ones help uncover trends

From my one-to-ones I found that the main reason people were not using the training days was because they weren’t sure what to do with them. If people were going to a conference or working toward a qualification or certification it was easy to identify the time spent on that as ‘training’. But what if you are already qualified? or there isn’t a conference on this quarter? or you want to spend some time testing out new technology?

Crew Hackathons

I came up with the idea of running some small hackathons within the crew and suggested we could use training days for these. The idea is that people will pair for a couple of days to create something new. This aligns with our company values: being in this together, actively learning, trust to deliver, and making a difference. But I also wanted to push the joy/excitement axis up a bit as well (see previous post).

Because people never want an extra meeting, we decided to schedule this as a special retrospective session. We kept the happiness axis exercise and collected a few actions based on that, but we spent most of the hour running a hackathon proposal exercise outlined below:

• Everyone tries to write down a couple of ideas for 2-day projects they would like to work on, and spends a couple of minutes to get others excited about it.

• Vote proposals. Everyone has 2 votes to pick a project (other than their own). Only projects with 2 or more votes survive.

The projects do not need to be directly related to work, but we should learn something from them. The idea is to spend one day together working out designs, and another day creating a prototype or something usable.

I explained the exercise a week in advance, so people had time to think of projects before the meeting.

Deciding on projects

The exercise went well and everyone seemed quite excited. It turns out that a few people had similar ideas, so we grouped some projects together. We then drew a matrix so everyone could cast their votes. This is how the whiteboard looked:

The top row of the matrix has the people initials, with the number of available training days written below.

We (a team of seven) decided to work on 3 projects. The projects with more votes will have a couple of hackathons associated with them – this is particularly useful if we can’t get together all at the same time. We can also start thinking at this stage if we are going to need any materials, e.g. books, that we need to buy before we get started.

Scheduling the hackathons

We have the ideas, the people, and most importantly, the excitement, so now it’s just a matter of scheduling these hackathons. If a person is working for the full 10 days in a sprint, they instantly become candidates for any of the hackathons they showed interest in. If we can find someone else interested in the same project who has enough training days available, we pair them together and schedule it in the sprint.

Some of these projects have more than two people interested – in this case we have a 1-hour meeting with everyone interested in it, to come up with a plan and decide how we’ll split the work. For instance, if it was a project that involved four developers and two different platforms, one group could work on one platform one sprint, and the other group could do the other platform the following sprint.

Conclusion

Small hackathon exercises can be helpful for people that don’t know what to do with their training days. Other people can bring ideas that suddenly open the curiosity box, and we can turn the learning exercise into a shared experience. Just as it is, it’s a valuable experience. But some of the projects can even turn into something bigger that brings additional value to the company. I think it’s probably worth running this exercise every quarter, to disconnect from your main duties and refresh a bit. If you can’t find the time to run this, just pack it inside one of your retrospectives. You can always use the happiness axis for a swifter retrospective, and move straight away into finding topics for the hackathons.

Scrum retrospectives are a great opportunity to sit down with your team and make everyone’s voice heard. It’s about collective process improvement, by getting everyone involved and owning part of that process, it’s also about feelings, and about empathizing with each other.

A typical scrum retrospective

If you have a formula that works for your team, it’s good to repeat it: your team members will know what to do without having to repeat the agenda every week. However, it can be beneficial to try different things from time to time.

The most important source of ideas is probably the one-to-one meetings. Some team members may actually find the retrospectives boring or not particularly useful, and they may have ideas to improve them. Try some of them, discard things that do not work, and keep the things that people get more involved with.

We started our retrospectives with classical good / bad clustering: we draw two axis, time on the horizontal, and goodness to badness in the vertical, and people write down 2 positive things and 2 negative things, with a number from +5 to -5, and stick the post-its on the whiteboard. Every week, a different person tries to cluster the post-it notes into different categories. Sometimes, the time scale is a good indicator of a cluster, but we usually re-cluster them into more meaningful categories. Then, that person tries to explain what went well and what went badly during the sprint, asking the relevant people to explain their tickets. The important thing is trying to identify actions based on those notes, pretty much working out the start-stop-continue from that set. However, we don’t do this exhaustively. We focus on the immediately actionable items, the biggest wins and fails.

Some suggested we were wasting too much time on this, and we tried creating a thread on Slack for every sprint where people could write down thoughts as events happened during the sprint, and others would react with emoji. The thread died out after a few sprints, and we realized it was better to think retrospectively during the allocated time slot and get physically involved, i.e., standing up and writing things down.

Happiness axis

Our company wanted to measure happiness somehow. We discussed the option of having some anonymous surveys sent regularly to measure it, but many in the team were put off by having to fill in surveys online. So I decided to do something during the retrospective time, and get people directly involved.

I’ve selected 6 feelings or axes, 3 positive ones juxtaposed with 3 negative ones. Humans are complicated and full of emotions, so I tried to pick up things that I consider actionable in the work environment. This is our list:

Positive	Negative
Enjoyment – did I work on something I enjoy?	Boredom – most of the stuff was tedious and/or boring
Sense of accomplishment – I got that thing done!	Despair – I’m getting nowhere
Powered up – learned something useful!	Powered down – I feel I’m losing my skills

I think it’s important to keep it small, though. You don’t want to model the whole brain!

During the retrospective, we draw these axes on the whiteboard. Then, everyone stands up and casts up to 3 votes on any of the axes,

• You don’t need to use all the votes (abstentions are counted as well)

• You can vote in opposite axes (half of the sprint was really fun, but the other half was boring)

• Preferably, add equally-spaced ticks, so we can draw a spider graph in the end.

And this is how it looks in the end,

Actions based on happiness axis

Here are some of the recipes we have for actions based on the result of the happiness axis exercise,

• … if joy is low:

  • everyone should have at least one ticket they would enjoy working on in next sprint;

• … if boredom is high:

  • promote team work (e.g. pair-programming), from the premise that the conversation will make tedious tasks less painful;

• … if not powering up:

  • plan for new things in next sprint;

  • schedule training time;

• … when powering down:

  • discuss during the retrospective and/or one-on-ones which abilities are not being put to use. Try to find a place for them;

  • reduce time spent in repetitive tasks;

• … when there’s no sense of accomplishment:

  • create smaller tickets with a well-defined goal;

  • try a “Demo-Driven Development” approach (this is a name I came up with): small features that are always “demoable”;

• … when people feel they are going nowhere:

  • align the tickets with the company/crew objectives, so the goal is well defined;

  • identify blockers and deal with them ASAP (e.g. build issues).

Simple data visualization

In order to track the changes of the team mood over time, we also write the votes down in our Wiki. We keep 3 tables, one for each opposite axes, where each data point is just the date, the value on the positive axis, and the values on the negative one. Confluence can conveniently plot these for you,

From the graphs we noticed things like cycles in despair and accomplishment, that we regarded as being caused by having features that require a couple of sprints to complete, so the first sprint is full of despair, but when the feature gets finally completed in the following sprint, the sense of accomplishment spikes up.

Written down in words, it seems like a complex exercise, but it’s something that can be done really quickly, so we’ve kept this as part of our retrospectives.

Conclusion

There is no “correct” way of running scrum retrospectives, but the important thing is that they are dynamic and not too long. Also, make sure that people get involved in them. You probably know more or less what people feel from one-to-ones, but it’s important that they share some of that with everyone else in the team. At least, try to record the actionable needs. The happiness axis exercise is quick and it takes the scare out of surveys, and turns it into something a bit more fun. But if you feel stale, try doing something completely different from time to time, like brainstorming for ideas that people would like to work in with others. I’ll come back to that in a future post.