Radars are a retrospective activity that is perfect for gathering data with your team.
See this article if you'll be facilitating a Radar activity.
Table of Contents
What is a Radar?
Radars are valuable as they help to align team members, reveal areas of agreement or disagreement, and encourage reflection at both the individual and team levels. They function as a brief survey that quickly identifies where things are going well (or not) and where viewpoints may differ. Since everyone can easily view aggregated results like the average and standard deviation, it's an efficient way to focus the follow-up discussion on the most important topics.
Unlike column-based retrospectives, Radars don't require team members to generate text-based notes. Instead, each team member provides a response using a 1-5 scale, and the results are automatically calculated and displayed on a Radar chart.
The phases of a Radar
Define
- This is where you will start once your facilitator begins the Radar. In this phase, the facilitator can modify the spoke titles and descriptions if needed to ensure there is understanding and agreement amongst the team.
- If a topic or category is not clearly defined, speak up and let your facilitator know!
- The facilitator will progress to the Collect phase once there is a shared understanding and agreement of the spokes. Your screen will follow automatically as the phases progress.
Collect
Line colors are randomly generated for each participant and do not correlate with specific people.
- Each participant will anonymously rate each spoke on a scale of 1-5.
- Participants can see how many ratings each participant in the retrospective has left to give, but you cannot see who is voting for which cards. This is done to preserve the psychological safety of the votes.
- The facilitator can advance the retrospective to the Analysis phase when the team is ready.
Analyze
- Retrium will anonymously plot the individual responses and automatically calculate metrics like the average, standard deviation, and more.
- You can highlight your individual responses on the Radar for yourself only by clicking Highlight your response.
- From here, your facilitator will guide you on how you'll use this information for your retrospective or other conversations.