Retrospective plan for a new scrum team

We feel it is important for teams new to Scrum to get value from their retrospectives right from the beginning. With new teams we usually facilitate the first retrospective with the ScrumMasters observing. We share our retro plan with them in advance so they can follow what we are doing.

Here is a simple retrospective plan following the 5 steps for a team new to Scrum. We made sure to keep the focus positive and introduce basic techniques like brainstorming, clustering and dot voting that the teams are likely to use again and again. Since the team is new all the techniques need to be explained. We also made sure that the team picked an action that was within their own control, since many new Scrum teams believe that things outside the team need to change, and don’t realise how much they can change themselves.