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It seems to be a common understanding that retrospectives are the major practice that enable agility. However, conducting virtual retrospectives is often not straight forward. One possibility is to conduct a retrospective at each site and then to swap the different findings afterwards. Another one is to facilitate a joint virtual retrospective using different virtual communication channels. In this workshop we will explore practices and facilitation techniques that have helped in different global projects. Moreover we’ll indicate supporting tools and how to prepare such a workshop.

It seems to be a common understanding that retrospectives are the major practice that make a process agile. Moreover, even in a non-agile environment, teams will benefit from continuous improvements generated by retrospectives. Therefore, members of distributed projects should get this opportunity of continuous learning as well. However, conducting virtual retrospectives is often not so straight forward. One possibility is to conduct a retrospective at each site and either having an exchange via video conferencing during the workshop (if the time difference permits) or swapping the different findings after the retrospective. In this session I will show some options how the exchange of the learnings can possibly work. Another possibility is to facilitate a joint virtual retrospective using different virtual communication channels. I want to indicate which tools support virtual retrospectives, how such a workshop can be prepared best, and how you can overcome the boredom – which is typically a bigger challenge for virtual retrospectives than for direct ones.

In this session I want to point out some practices and facilitation techniques that have helped in the different global projects I have been working on. In addition I want to reveal what needs to be watched out for. My experiences are mainly based on large global agile projects in embedded and commercial software development.