There’s so much to do that it’s not unusual for a team to finish a project and immediately start on a new one, leaving little time to reflect and improve. Agile methodology preaches continuous improvement, which means running retrospectives after each sprint or project to identify strengths and learn from mistakes so your team stops making them.

While agile methodology typically focuses on development teams, at Atlassian, we believe every team can benefit from agile techniques. We built the Retrospectives blueprint to make it easy to reflect, learn, and improve from one sprint, project, or launch to the next.

Run retrospectives – reflect and improve

Whether you’re a development team that wants to hold a retrospective after each sprint or a marketing team that wants to hold a retrospective at the end of a big launch, the Retrospective blueprint makes the best practice an easy practice for any team seeking to go agile.

For us (at Atlassian), a retrospective involves asking the team what went well and what didn’t go so well. And then we go through each item individually and workout how we can do the good things more or improve on the bad things for next time.

Matt Ryall, Confluence Development Manager
Atlassian Inc.

Bring stakeholders into your retrospective

The Retrospective blueprint makes it easy to invite participants to contribute their feedback ahead of time so that no time is wasted during your retrospective meeting. Running retrospectives in Confluence means team members can contribute from anywhere at any time, so the learning isn’t limited to who’s in the office for the meeting.

image2013-10-30 18-22-43

Standardize your retrospective process

The Retrospective blueprint comes bundled with a simple template for your teammates to take turns filling out on their own time. There are three simple steps:

  1. What did we do well?
  2. What should we have done better?
  3. Action items (What are we going to do better for next time?)

image2013-10-30 18-24-59

When it’s all said and done, your retrospective page might look something similar to my team’s retrospective page after we launched the Shared Links blueprint last month:

image2013-10-30 18-25-34

Or if you’re development team, your sprint retrospective might look like this:

image2013-10-30 18-26-39

Access all of your retrospectives in one place

Similar to other blueprints, all of your team’s retrospectives are easily accessible from the space sidebar as they are automatically collected in one place on an index page:

image2013-10-30 18-28-58

Customize for your team’s retrospectives

Every team is different. The Retrospectives blueprint is just our recommendation to help your team get started quickly. It’s important to remember that part of being Agile is to try different techniques and adopt what works best for your team. There are many others including the “Stop, Start, Continue” technique and the “Sail Boat“, “Mad, Sad, Glad“. You can customize the Retrospective blueprint from the Content Tools screen in theSpace Admin console.

image2013-10-30 18-30-4

Get started with retrospectives

Continuous improvement starts with the Retrospective blueprint. Do agile right and start reflecting and improving today.

Using OnDemand?

You’ve been auto-upgraded. Start a retrospective from the “Create” dialog.

Using Download?

If you are running Confluence Confluence 5.3 or later you can update the Confluence Software Blueprints Bundle via the Atlassian Marketplace which includes the Retrospective blueprint.

Do agile right. Run retrospectives in Confluence