How can a team member moderate a retrospective?

Question

In my organization, we decided to hold retrospectives. To be honest, this was a move facilitated by me, because I felt that we should improve our teamwork after a rise from two members in one office to four members in adjacent offices.

We have one person for support and everything non-code related, two designated programmers of which I am one and our sponsor who also codes and created the framework.

Can we hold a retrospective with one team member/sponsor being the moderator at all, and how would that work?

I ask, because I tried to moderate and found it increasingly difficult to position myself outside the team for these reasons:

• I want to participate actively.
• My personal experience as a team member would be helpful.
• As a team member I am not external and always involved, while trying the opposite feels artificial.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Ideal

The best thing would be of course to have a separate moderator.

Now, considering that if you could do this, you would have already, here is a proposition, which should be considered in all such cases: cycle.

Abstract

That is: when an important role needs to be regularly taken by some group member, but that assuming this role prevents him/her to assume his usual status of group member and causes frustration or loss of feedback, try to have group members alternately take the responsibility.

Concrete

Have your team members take the moderator responsibility one after the other on each retrospective. This will directly solve your first two points, which are your own frustration and the loss of your feedback for the team.

This will also help alleviate the burden of trying to be neutral, as the mediator knows he will be able to express his/her own feelinds on the next retrospective, and the other members will be more likely to help him/her as they will have felt the pain themselves.

Sociological vision

This will have the added benefit of making attendants more responsible. You will indeed be building an implicitly normative system of reciprocity where attendants will try to be easily “manageable” by the moderator, as they know they will have to assume the role next time, and will want others to behave in a gentle way.

Future

Pure linear alternation, depending on your team, may or may not be sustainable. Such cycling can be exchanged for volunteering (if enough different people do volunteer so that there is no feeling of power taking by a subset), or consensual election. The decision process should be left to the team to choose.

Answer 2

Not just in retrospectives, but in most workshops and meetings, it is very wise to have a facilitator that is separate from the team. This role is for meeting control and does not participate in the meeting content. If you commingle roles, you are degrading the effectiveness of the facilator. So I would answer your question with a no. Bring in a separate facilitator.

Answer 3

My answer is exactly the same as for a previous question:

The Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen will answer all your questions about retrospectives including facilitation (as far as I remember a hole chapter talks about it, like setting the stage, preparation etc.)

Answer 4

You can also look at this position: The Retrospective Handbook This book can be helpful for people that begining doing retrospectives. You will find there for example description of such tools like checklists (Do you have enought markers in the same color, to assure the anonymity for participants? etc.) There is also a part about the prime derective and its importance.