The Difference Between Launching a Team vs Program vs Organizational Retrospective

Getting together regularly with your team to reflect, discuss and streamline the problematic areas of your process will keep your group on the path to success. That's why team retrospective meetings have become so popular.

But, when the practice of retrospectives is expanded out across the entire organization, this unlocks a whole array of other, even stronger benefits at scale. Retrospectives with a wider scope can surface problems and provide solutions that affect teams of team, how they interact with each other, and how they produce valuable work.

This unlock the potential of retrospectives on all levels of the organization, ScatterSpoke supports both team and program level online retrospectives so you can scale this powerful Agile meeting beyond just one team.

Start with a Team Retrospective

If you're an Administrator in your ScatterSpoke account, you can launch a retrospective for your team from almost anywhere inside the tool. Start by creating your first team and navigate to any of the + Create Team Retrospective buttons to launch your online team retrospective.

More on creating your first team in ScatterSpoke here.

Team retrospectives are the first layer of retrospectives in ScatterSpoke.

Scale to a Program Retrospective

If you're a Program Manager or Team Lead that is looking after several Agile teams, this team of teams can retro in parallel if you create a Program in your Main Dashboard in ScatterSpoke.

Program retrospectives are the second layer of retrospectives in ScatterSpoke.

Navigate to the bottom lefthand corner of your screen and create your first program to indicate the connection between the teams you're currently managing. More on creating a program here.

By creating a program and selecting the teams that will be part of it, you enable new setting options and data tracking for the identified teams as a collective. From this point on, you will be able to configure online retrospective board settings across teams through Program Settings.

Through your Program Settings and Program Teams area, you can set:

• Default to invite program team members with a URL
• Default all retrospective boards for your teams to the Guided Retrospective process
• Default vote count for all retro boards created by this team
• Set the focus of your teams
• Which integrations are available for your teams
• Manage the teams and users that are a part of your program

To launch a Program Retrospective for all of your teams at once, navigate to your Program Retrospectives page using the lefthand toolbar.

Use the Create Program Retrospective button to create a new retrospective for your Program’s teams.

For more about creating a Retrospective, check out How to Create a New Retrospective.

All of your team members, across the teams in your Program, will be able to participate in this retrospective board, giving feedback about the process.

Roll Out Retrospectives Throughout the Organization

When you feel ready, you can also use ScatterSpoke to run an organization-wide retrospective that includes all contributors, teams, and programs that you manage. While organizational retrospectives are more infrequent, they are effective in aggregating a wide variety of data points from many people all at once.

Navigate to your Organization Dashboard and then select Retrospectives in the left-side menu.

On the Retrospectives page, click the "Create organization retrospective" dropdown and select "Create retrospective".

For more about creating a Retrospective, check out How to Create a New Retrospective.

Being a Better Leader Starts With Data

Setting up a Program inside ScatterSpoke not only makes it easier to ensure your teams have what they need to run regular retrospective meetings, it also enables you to be a better leaders of your teams.

With cross-team data at your fingertips, you have the details you need to make decisions based on input from your teams, support your team in an informed way, and discover more opportunities to help them resolve their process challenges.