It happens that when you suggest a retrospective meeting to a team you hear something like:
“we sit together and talk often, why the hell should we waste our time for another meeting?”
Makes sense, doesn’t it?
And yet, my whole experience tells me otherwise. Even though we talk with each other every day, even though our chat channel is full of discussions (and memes), even though it seems there is nothing worth sharing that we hadn’t already shared and discussed… well, when we finally meet and talk, we find out there was something worth talking about. If there is a shared understanding that this is the time to share & solve issues that bother the team, it will happen. People will start solving problems that they had been talking about for some time.
Once I run a retrospective with a non-dev team for the first time in their life. They worked together since months and they were getting along well — so, there definitely was a lot of communication going on all the time.
Now, the main action point they came up with during the retrospective was to… move the carpet that was in their room! It occurred, that it was laid out so inconveniently, that their office chairs (on wheels) caught on it repeatedly. And the often complained about it, they joked about it, but somehow they needed this meeting to actually do something about it.
After this retrospective they moved it.
I guess this is because they felt for — the first time — that this is an issue that bothers all of them. And so they acted.
Make sure you meet and talk from time to time, so that no carpets stand in your team’s way!