Retrospecting, Again, Plus a Survey

For today's retrospective I took a slightly different tack. We've been reverting to the "standard" good/bad/improve format lately, and it doesn't seem to have been very effective. Today I kept the perspective firmly on concrete future actions, asking the team to come up with things they could do tomorrow to make things better. I also tried out the 1/2/4/all (we only had four today) format that got so much exercise at the Agile Games last year.

Most of the concerns fell into a couple of affinity areas, and the top one had to do with the clarity and availability of requirements. I have therefore scheduled a quick meeting with the product owner team (yeah, there's more than one, which is... a problem) for tomorrow afternoon, and am also going to try a little experiment during sprint planning. It's going to be a little excruciating during the meeting, but I'm hoping that it will drive home the point that we have been shortchanging our grooming process.

I'm also putting together a survey in hopes of actually teaching some of those things I have picked up for my inventory. I'm not feeling very optimistic about it, or anything else, today, but gotta keep on going.

EDIT: 11 responses so far today!
EDIT: 6 more, for 17 responses total.

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