Dialogue Sheets - update & new planning sheet

Last month InfoQ carried an update on the use of retrospective dialogue sheets. The use of these sheets continues to grow and I continue to receive good feedback.

If you’ve tried the sheets and haven’t sent me some feedback than please e-mail me and let me know about your experiences.

And for those of you who’ve not tried a dialogue sheet retrospective, whats stopping you? The Dialogue Sheet PDFs are free to download. For those who don’t have a large A1 Printer/Plotter there is a print on demand service for all the dialogue sheets.

I have also added a new sheet, this one is designed for Iteration Planning Meetings. I think one of the things teams new to Agile struggle with is the initial planing meetings. So I’ve created a new A1 sheet to guide teams through the planning meeting. This one has a bit more of a board game feel because there are activities to do and steps to repeat.

One thing I realised when creating this sheet is: planning meetings are not simple, and there are lots of variations in them. So I set about writing a Guide to Iteration Planning meetings. This turned out to be a little longer than I expected but this just goes to show what is involved. If you intend to use the sheet then I recommend you read the guide too.

Like the other sheets the planning sheet is free to download although I ask people to register - the guide is free without registration. Again, the printed version is available from the print on demand service too.

When I do training course I always give teams one or two retrospective dialogue sheets for them to use for their first retrospectives. I’m hoping that the planning sheet will fill a similar role at the start of the iteration.

I should say, I’m not completely sure this iteration planning sheet qualifies as a dialogue sheet in the strictest sense because it is much more guided and less about discussion. That said, I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules on what is, and what is not, a true dialogue sheet.