Tips to improve your Sprint Retrospectives, which can be applied to any collaborative session:

1. Use silence
2. Use different group configurations
3. Get people moving and taking action
4. Shake things up
5. Come in with an agenda but be flexible.

Common wasteful activities include the following:

1. Manual regression testing
2. Environments not available when needed, including crashes and restarts
3. Starting work on a PBI and then discovering it has a dependency on another team and cannot be resolved during the Sprint
4. Filling out requests for other teams to perform activities and encountering delays in their response (e.g., access to logs, changing a network setting, restarting a system)
5. Filling out a security review form that has many irrelevant or unclear questions, which takes a lot of time and often requires additional follow-ups for clarification
6. A team member being interrupted constantly and having to spend time reorienting himself or herself back to the work
7. A poorly documented aspect of the system, which causes team members to have to relearn by asking other team members and researching every time they need to work in that area
8. Detailing too much of the “how” for all PBIs during Sprint Planning and having to rework many of the tasks in the Sprint Backlog as the work unfolds

Tracking Impediments and Quantifying Impacts. Here is a impediments chart example:

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people with a common interest. They share their experiences with each other and have a common desire to improve. Managers need to support communities. Let people join communities coluntaryly and self-organize.

A Scrum Master must choose the best approach(es) based on context.

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (Box of Crayons Press, 2016)