How to Use Trello for Effective Team Retrospectives

Luis Ortiz

— 3 min read

A retrospective is an essential part of every team's project management process. It is a time for the team to reflect on their work, identify areas of improvement, and create actionable steps for moving forward.

In this article, we'll guide you through using Trello to streamline and optimize your team's retrospective process.

Topics to check

  1. Set Up a New Board
  2. Choose Your Technique
  3. Add Cards
  4. Review and Create Action Items
  5. Track Progress

Step 1: Set Up a New Board

The first step in using Trello for retrospectives is to create a new board. This board will serve as the central hub for all your retrospective information. To create a new board, log into Trello and click the "Create Board" button. Give your board a descriptive name, such as "Team Retrospective Board."

Then you must install the retrospective's power-up. This tool will allow you to run fully customizable retrospective sessions in minutes.

Step 2: Choose Your Technique

Next, you must choose the technique to use with your team. Traditionally, each assistant would answer these three questions:

  • What went well?
  • What didn’t go as well?
  • What could be different?

But if you feel like those don't meet the necessities of your team, there are a wide variety of agile retrospective techniques to choose from, or you can even create your own.

3. The Blameless Retrospective

As mentioned before, the goal of framing your Retrospectives within the Prime Directive values is to have productive sessions while preventing the team's mood from being negatively affected. You must ensure to follow its principles to make all your Retrospectives blaming-free.

Remembering the Prime Directive at the start of any session is step one, but you must ensure a safe space for the whole meeting. That means anybody should be ready to interfere if any discussion catches fire. In that sense, respect is a value that goes hand-to-hand as well.

When discussing respect, we consider good advice by Sverrir Tynes, Atlassian Solutions Partner. He thinks it is not only about being polite, but it's also important that making sure all voices are heard is considered part of that respect. That's why the Scrum Master, but also the more extroverted members of the team, should help the more shy teammates to always participate.

4. The Anonymous Retrospective

It would be great if all teams could always conduct their Retrospectives within the Prime Directive values, actively participating and respecting each other. But what happens when there's not enough trust yet for people to get comfortable to fully express themselves?

Maybe some Agile practitioners consider that anonymous participations oppose to the principles of clarity and transparency. Still, it can help people openly share their thoughts, which is Agile compliant. In the end, you want to learn what's working fine, what's not, and how to improve. It doesn't matter if you have to carry some anonymous Retros before the team is ready to directly say what they think.

Anonymous sessions might always be blameless. By taking out people's names, you are only left with ideas.

If you think trying anonymous Retros may help your team have better sessions, try Agile Retrospectives for Jira or Confluence. This add-on lets you easily configure and run Retros in four simple steps, with unique features such as the capability of hosting anonymous sessions.

You can have a sneak-peak of the app in the following video walkthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYSVgXgm0Lc&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE

Start your free trial here.

In conclusion

  • The Prime Directive’s purpose is to set the right environment to review the past work cycle, without apportioning blame. It promotes the idea that everyone did their best, given the circumstances.

  • Running anonymous Retrospectives can almost ensure your sessions are blameless. They can be a great tool to build trust between people, specially in recently formed teams.

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