Implement Feedback Loops

You know, one of the best things about Scrum is the number of opportunities you have to gather feedback. Feedback from the team, feedback from your product owners, from your stakeholders, your users. I'm gonna go follow her and I'm gonna go offer some feedback. Our fifth practice of Kanban is establish feedback loops. Sort of by the book, Kanban. It's called establish feedback loops. But check it out, scrub masters, you already have feedback loops. You're already doing them. So consider this. Now that your Kanban system is starting to feed you more information, starting to, like we said, reveal where the real problems are at your system. Imagine how much data and feedback you can bring to the team as you're facilitating those Scrum events. Let's consider your shortest feedback loop the Daily Scrum. Perhaps you're asking the three questions, very popular. What did you complete yesterday? What are you going to complete today? Is anything blocking? With your work now visualized on the Kanban board, you can begin to sort of add, ask different questions, or talk about different pieces of information. A great technique for you Scrum masters here is to work the board right to left. What I mean by that is, during your daily standup, have conversations about the work that's furthest to the right on your Kanban board. Start there. Could we swarm that last piece of work to get it moved all the way across to the finish line? Who is blocked with this particular piece of work? Because remember, our goal is, is to get that work done and moved along to the finished column. So daily standup, a feedback loop you already have now, enhanced by the power of Kanban. Let's consider another one, my favorite Scrum event, the retrospective. How are your retrospectives? Are they sort of a long, you know, gripe session, or are they a big celebration where we're only talking about the good things we did? Or are they even happening? Could that be you, Scrum Master? Are your retros being canceled like nobody wants to come to them? Yeah, it happens. They kind of can get stale over time. So here again, this feedback loop, the retrospective. Think about all the information the Kanban board is bringing to you. So now you're facilitating a robust and rich conversation with real data and looking for those ways to improve as a team. Your feedback sessions just become enhanced and become so much more valuable thanks to the Kanban system. Are you struggling to keep your retrospectives fresh and engaging? Check out Retromat. Retromat generates random plans for agile retrospectives. And with 144 different activities and a random generator that creates over 13 million combinations, you're likely never going to run the same retrospective again. Check it out. It sets you up with five different phases you can run through with your team. Starting out with setting the stage and moving through, gathering data, generating insights, deciding what to do and closing the retro. Copy and paste directly from the site or grab their Miro template for virtual collaboration. Now, this is my favorite retro tool of all time, and I hope you'll give it a shot. Retromat. Don't settle for boring retros. Again. So sort of technically, it's established. Feedback loops. Whatever. Let's call it enhanced feedback loops. You already have them. Let's just make them better. All right, so now it's your turn. I want you to think deeply about how you're going to turn your next feedback loop and into a more meaningful and powerful event for your Scrum team. So, for example, gather data on lead time and use that to drive the next conversation in the retrospective. Or collect cycle time information based on a workflow step and introduce that at the next retrospective or the example I gave you earlier at your next standup. Work the board right to left. Our fifth practice of Kanban, establish enhance feedback loops.