Approximately a sprint or two ago, we started using monday.com for our asynchronous sprint planning process. Alongside the sprint planning checklist, some measures were taken to try and move the Sprint Evaluations (sprint check-up form) and the Sprint Retrospectives to monday.com as well.
Unfortunately, after a small discussion on Tutorial: Getting to Know the New Sprint Evaluation & Retrospective Process and some help from other OpenCraft members, we discovered that some changes and improvements need to be done.
Accordingly, a new ticket was scheduled for this sprint to discuss the current processes and the new monday.com processes for Sprint Evaluation and Retrospective with Sustainability Managers and Sprint Managers.
A recording of a zoom call is added below. It’s a 30 minute call starting off with a 14 min recap of the discussion with Sustainability Managers, and the rest of the call is the discussion with Sprint Managers.
However, here’s a quick recap for anyone who would prefer to directly jump into the conversation, instead:
Call with Sustainability Managers
Participants: @daniel, @guruprasad, @raul
Outcome: Stick with Google Forms for Sprint Evaluations
Main Points:
- The current monday.com implementation connects Sprint Evaluation (sprint checkup) form with the Sprint Retrospectives; however, they shouldn’t be related.
The sprint evaluation or sprint checkup form is a self-evaluation form related to stress and personal issues. Meanwhile, the sprint retrospective is regarding improvements that can be done to OpenCraft.
Since sprint evaluations should be private, they shouldn’t be collected in the same form. - monday.com exports data as Excel and not CSV makes the new process less useful
- For the new monday.com process to be an improvement over Google Forms, a lot of automation needs to be done. The sustainability managers are already satisfied with the process and the manual work. Also, reasonable automation will still require manual work; and fully automating things will require a lot of hours, which is not worth it for now.
Call with Sprint Managers
Participants: @giovannicimolin, @mtyaka, @pooja
Outcome: Check if fully automating the process is possible
Main Points:
- Keeping discussions on monday.com will not help with discoverability of the discussions. So it’s important to continue to utilize the forum for discussions.
- Moving the retrospective over to monday.com doesn’t make much of a difference if the process isn’t fully automated.
- Possible solution is to fully automate it by utilizing monday.com to collect the sprint retrospectives, vote on the sprint retrospectives, and automatically post the top 3 or 5 points onto the forum.
Based on that information, do you agree with the outcomes of the meeting? Or do you have any suggestions that weren’t considered or mentioned?
Quick final note: thanks to everyone who already participated with the calls or the discussions on the forum!