Management Bug

Eduardo Espinheira
2 min readAug 25, 2020

Here is your weekly dose of Human Management with some more food for thought to leverage your growth.

Since we believe the Management Bugs are common and typical, every description is created and adapted from articles, blog posts, and definitions from other sources and authors.

A MngtBug is a problem, cause, or impact in a human manager’s decision, which produces an incorrect or unexpected result. Every other week we share a little bit of our knowledge base on social media and our newsletter. This week’s MngtBug is…

Details

This week’s “Lack of Sprint Retrospective Meetings” is one of the most crucial management bugs to target.

By definition, the sprint retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the following Sprints.

The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:
- Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
- Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements;
- Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work. (1)

There are many ways to tackle these meetings; one of the most common practices is to have a facilitator ask each person in the team to answer the following questions.
- What went well during the Sprint?
- What would we like to change?
- How can we implement that change? (2)

These questions allow the team to think, and at the same time, provides ownership to each team member, thus making it truly Agile. (3)

These three simple questions, when some teams jump them, they open the door to some side effects, like:
- Things are brought up that never end up changing or getting implemented.
- It is a missed opportunity for the team to grow as a whole.
- Let pass for the short term can have a disastrous, in the long-term effect of changing the culture within the organization. (4)

Usual Solutions

Eduardo Espinheira

Eduardo Espinheira is a Consultant, Facilitator, Manager, Public Speaker, Creator of the Management Bugs&Fixes and the Machiavellian PM Stories