The retrospective is a central element of every agile process and its successful implementation is a key to effective agility.
The introduction to the retrospective, often referred to as “Set the stage“, gives participants the opportunity to forget their thoughts on day-to-day business for a moment and opens up the space for what follows.
Suno.ai
In addition to many other excellent ideas, that can be found in the Retr-O-Mat, for example, artificial intelligence offers new possibilities.
For a few months now, Suno.ai has been offering the opportunity to have a song, including lyrics, generated free of charge from the text you enter. The possibility of transforming team input into acoustic content within seconds seemed ideal to me in terms of distraction from day-to-day business and transition to the retrospective.
Implementation: The song for the sprint
I came up with the following idea to enable a combination of easy-to-find content and an introduction to the sprint retrospective:
In the area of the next retrospective on the board, in this case Miro, I prepared 3 columns:
- A column to choose the music style (jazz, classical, rock, rap, …) with one dot for each team member to vote their favourite,
- a column to choose an emotion that represents the past sprint, e.g. tired, sad, …, with one dot for each team member to vote the emotion that describes the last sprint best and
- a column in which each team member can suggest their topic that defines the last print best in their point of view, with two votes for each team member.
That might look like this:
Within the Retrospective there only a few things to do:
- Let the team members vote using the dots, one dot per person for the first 2 columns and two dots for the 3rd column,
- post the result as text in the “Song Description” field at Suno.ai and
- click on “Create”.
After a short wait, the team can listen to the 1-2 songs generated.
Example
The team might have chosen the following
- music style: Rap,
- emotion representing the sprint: Grateful
- topic for the last sprint: Got Help by Gerhard
So the prompt for Suno.ai might be: “a grateful rap song about being helped by Gerhard“.