Thursday, March 27, 2014

Retrospective ingredients continued...

Kaizen vs Retrospectives

In Kanban, Scrum retrospectives have been replaced with Kaizen meetings (kaizen in Japanese means “continuous improvement”). The difference is subtle but powerful. We have Kaizen meetings every two weeks; engineers and product owners discuss how the process should be modified to improve velocity and quality, while reducing overhead. Instead of looking back and critiquing what we did, all the energy is forward-looking and focused on process improvement. Defensiveness down, collaboration up!  

Everything in the process is fair game and any new idea is treated as an experiment to be tested. Most ideas are given a try, and very few are shot down. As a result, kaizen meetings have an upbeat, creative feel and the process runs very smoothly.

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