The agile ‘Kanban health check’ retrospective -incl. access

Are you searching for an agile “retrospective kanban”, or in other words, an agile retrospective format for a kanban team? Perfect - you found what you are looking for.

Retrospective Kanban

A retrospective focused on agile Kanban teams

To begin with, obviously, even in agile kanban teams you can do the typical agile sprint retrospective formats like the “Keep, Stop, Start,” Starfish or Sailboat Retrospective or similar ones

But as you are searching for a kanban retrospective, I guess you are looking to reflect your kanban ways of working specifically. This is the reason why in this kanban retrospective, we will basically do an agile health check of your kanban processes.

The Retrospective Kanban Health Check

This “Kanban Retrospective” basically gives you a few points, a few health check phrases that you can discuss with your agile team.

Each of them is a “best practice” behavior or artifact in great agile Kanban teams. Typically, each team member anonymously answers the following questions on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

Retrospective: Kanban Process

• “Our Kanban board reflects the current state of our work.”
• “In our stand-up meetings, we focus on important tasks and the efficiency of our work.”
• “The WIP limits of each phase optimize our flow.”

Retrospective: Kanban planning

• “Our team has good planning reliability.”
• “We question the value of tasks and discard them when appropriate.”
• “Work on top of the queue is always up to date and ready to pull.”
• “We are good at handling unscheduled work.”

Retrospective: Kanban Metrics

• “We inspect our flow metrics to identify room for improvement.”
• “We have suitable metrics and ways to visualize our performance and cumulative flow.”

Retrospective: Kanban Improvements

• “In our team, we implement meaningful continuous improvements.”
• “The team members individually take responsibility for improvements.”

The anonymous results regarding these points are then reflected upon in your agile retrospective. After you have made the results of the individual points visible, you can ask: “How do you explain the results? Feel free to also share what you personally answered.”

By the way: Our agile health check and retrospective tool Echometer helps you to do exactly this workshop in a remote online setting. If you want to do this kanban retrospective for free, simply open it following the button.

The button takes you directly to a retro. If you want to customize the questions, you need to create a free account first.

Again, you might want to add open questions like in the typical retrospective formats - what went well, what didn’t go so well, apart from Kanban?

The rest of the agile sprint retrospective proceeds according to the typical 5 phases of a retrospective - voting on the most important topics, and then enough time for the development of good action items or measures.

Why I like this retrospective

I really like this sprint retrospective (and other health check retrospectives) because you can repeat them - and if you’ve improved, you can see how you’ve improved after 3-12 months based on concrete figures!

Of course, these numbers are just perceptions of the team members. But still, they help you to at least get an indication of your Agile coaching performance (finally).

Conclusion - Kanban Retrospective

Kanban is a simple approach, but there is a lot of things that are not that easy to accomplish. These best practices of successful agile kanban teams should have given you some inspiration on how to improve in your “retrospective kanban”.

In any case, there are even more things you can get better on. If you want to have more of these items and maybe even implement a a continuous team health check would like to introduce (including measuring “Kanban quality”, of course), you can do so for free with Echometer now.