Agile at Work / Getting better with Agile Retrospectives - Understanding the Role of Facilitator

To understand the role of facilitator, we must have a solid foundation of learning from a retrospective. Most teams focus on the wrong items and only talk about a few things that could have been improved, losing sight of the intended purpose. This is where independent facilitators come in, hired by organizations. These facilitators come in and run each retrospective, helping the team get the most out of the time, sometimes acting more as consultants for each team. This arbitrator gives good insight and an unbiased voice, but organizations can sometimes struggle with the time and cost of finding these independent facilitators. Because of this, it usually pushes someone from the team to help facilitate, with many teams asking the scrum master. Retrospectives give teams a designed reflection of their work and time spent, looking back on the previous sprint to change or improve different aspects. Since the role of a scrum master is about action, they help remove any obstacles for the team, helping fix any problems that might occur. Ideally, due to conflict of interest, you wouldn’t want the same person who finds problems to be the one who tries to fix them. These facilitators should also push their team to figure out how to improve the process. By the time it reaches a retrospective, it’s usually too late to fix the road block. It is always good to find out how to prevent the same problem from occurring again and for that, we can look towards our developers. But with these new roles, subtle differences change the agendas for any retrospective. Instead of fixing the process, we start to incorporate and talk about new tools and technologies, guiding them in a entirely new direction. The main concern should be trying to be aware of your own biases, to fight your own instincts, making sure the team doesn’t just follow your ideas, and understanding that your can be a facilitator or a contributor, just not at the same time.

Works Cited

"Understand the Role of Facilitator." Lynda.com - from LinkedIn, www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Understand-role-facilitator/175961/468242-4.html?srchtrk=index%3a1%0alinktypeid%3a2%0aq%3aagile+five+phases+of+retrospective%0apage%3a1%0as%3arelevance%0asa%3atrue%0aproducttypeid%3a2.

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