Action Item

Teams that produce nothing in a retrospective are rare. Ask what was uncomfortable and it generally comes out. The problem is the side where nothing is different the following cycle.

At Pagedeck that state ran for three cycles. Deploying being frightening came up three times in a row, and each time it ended with an agreement that automating it would be nice. At the fourth retrospective the same topic came up again.

The reason is that the sentence had no person and no date in it. "Would be nice" belongs to nobody the moment the room empties, and work without an owner does not enter anyone's list.

Fixing a set of fields to convert what was said into something executable is what this item is.

Four fields. Leave one empty and the same topic returns at the next retrospective.

1. What to do, written as an action rather than a state. Improving deployment is a state; adding a rollback command to the deploy script is an action. Written as an action, whether it is finished can be judged.
2. One owner. Name the assignee who took it on. The team as a whole is not an owner. If two people are splitting it, split the item and put a name on each.
3. A date. Before the next retrospective, by default. On a two-week retrospective cycle the due date lands inside two weeks. Anything longer does not belong here; break off the first step and make that the item.
4. How it gets verified. What you will look at next time to call it done. With this field filled, the first five minutes of the next retrospective become a review of the last batch.

There is a rule on count as well: two or three per retrospective. Write ten and none of them happen, and once that has happened a few times the retrospective itself becomes a formality.

Where it lives is also fixed. Written only inside the retrospective document, nobody opens it again, so it gets registered as a work item somewhere the team looks daily. Landing in the same list as everything else is what gives it the same weight.

"Let's not end on 'would be nice.' Make it an action item — who, by when?"

A person and a date are what make it happen.

"Let's take only two action items out of this retrospective."

Cutting the count so they actually get done.

"Let's start with last time's action items."

Reviewing them is the first item on the agenda.

At Pagedeck, Mia spends the last ten minutes of a retrospective filling these fields in. Time for discussion is generous, but ten minutes before the end the meeting moves on regardless. Without those ten minutes it becomes a retrospective of good conversation and nothing else.

The next one opens with a review of the previous batch. Items not done get a question about why, and anything carried over three times gets deleted. Slipping three times says what its priority actually is, and leaving it on the list drags down the weight of everything beside it.