Mood Thermometer Retrospective

Outcomes

This retrospective technique is useful to gauge the team's mood during the Sprint and uncover the deeper reasons why things may not have gone the way originally planned. This may be particularly good when a team have experienced a difficult Sprint.

Timings

Allow for 5-30 minutes for this exercise

Equipment

• Sheet flip chart paper
• Sharpies for each member in the team
• Post-it notes

Tasks

1. Start by drawing a chart with a happy face and sad face on the vertical axis to represent the mood of the team, and the Sprint duration and timing over the horizontal axis. (Use as much space as possible for the chart to make it nice and big to accommodate lots of post-it notes later.)
2. Next ask the team for the majors events that happened during the Sprint, these could be positive events such as birthdays or releases, or challenging events such as dysfunctions and impediments for example. Write down the events along the horizontal axis to give an indication of when the events occurred
3. Then invite the attendees to draw a line starting at the start of the Sprint and finishing at the end that indicates their mood during the Sprint and how it change over time. (Asking the team to use different colours and put their names by each of their mood lines can help to identify them later.)
4. Then ask the team to write down on post-it notes why things affected their mood during the Sprint and place them relative to the mood lines on the flip chart paper.
5. Facilitate a discussion on how things can be improved and what actions may be appropriate to prevent challenges from happening in future Sprints, placing them on post-it notes in the centre of the table
6. Finally invite the team to dot vote on the most important actions to be resolved with each team member having 3 votes that they can cast, and prioritise the actions based on the voting

Don't forget to select at least one action to carry forwards to the next Sprint Planning session to be resolved in the next Sprint.