At the end of each sprint, I try to take a few minutes and think about what we delivered and accomplished.
Did we take on too much?
Did we not take on enough?
Did we have too many context switches?
Were there too many distractions that held us back?
Internally, I try to visualize what it was that made this a success and not past ones and/or vice-versa what went wrong that prevented this sprint from becoming a perfect sprint and what do we need to change for next time.
I do this exercise separately from the team retrospective, and generally after so I have all of their thoughts and comments running through my head. I evaluate it against all the other activities that we are doing — which ones are saving us time and what ones are holding us back.
If you are not performing this evaluation against your team’s feedback you are in danger of making a decision that could impact them greatly. Something you might see as ineffective might be something useful to the team and you wouldn’t want to stop that.
Perfect Sprints are hard to hit, each after another, but we can make them better.
