Stop running retros until you can answer this one question

[#1]

Quick disclosure: I'm a solo developer and I've built a Jira app for exactly this problem(Resurface).

I've been in many teams where each retro would end with the same action items every time. Everyone agrees they need to be done at the end of the meeting, yet they still come back next time. What's wrong? Are the action items impossible to complete? Nope, not really.

The problem, most of the time, a mix of the following:

• The action item has no owner. Guess what happens in this case? Nobody does it
• The action item has no due date. In this case it's just a wish, not really an action item
• It lives outside of the team's workflow. If the action item is on a 3rd party app retro board or a Confluence wiki page, nobody will open it until the next retro
• Nothing resurfaces it. Some 3rd party retro apps let you reimport your action items from the last meeting, but many times there's no way of bringing overdue items back
• There's just no accountability. Nobody is interested in or actually looks at things like how many retro action items we closed

How teams run retros these days

You can get a surprising amount of things done in Jira natively. Most teams have a special label or board for the retro action items, and discuss them in every standup. This way action items have owners and might even be part of a sprint.

Others, use Confluence and have, for example, a page for each retro meeting where they record what needs to be done.

But, the most common scenario is using a 3rd party retro app, there's a ton out there and all of them have basically the same feature, most of them allowing teams to reimport last retro's action items. Some of them, might even let you create Jira tickets from them.

I've even seen teams use spreadsheets for this, which works great for the most basic requirements.

So what is the question?

In the title I've said to stop running retros until you've answered this one question, and that question is(actually 2): how many action items got resolved last month and which action items came back over and over again?

To answer those questions, you have to follow 4 principles of effective retro action items:

1. Every action item needs to have an owner and a due date, this is decided at capture and is non-negotiable.
2. All the open items must be visible in one place, optionally with overdue items being highlighted
3. Overdue items come back automatically before the next retro
4. Someone or something tracks the closure rate over time, so you know if you are actually improving

The fundamental principle of action items in general, is making the team better. But how do you know if you get better if you don't measure it?

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I've built Resurface to make applying these 4 principles a no-brainer. It is the follow-through layer that turns retro action items, which could be generated manually or by a 3rd party retro app into owned, due-dated, tracked Jira issues that resurface until they are done.

Resurface nudges the owner, counts every carried-over item, and runs entierly on Atlassian.

How does your team keep action items from evaporating? I'm curious what worked, especially simple solutions, and if you want to check out my approach, Resurface is live on the marketplace today here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/3449871240/resurface-retro-action-item-tracker-accountability 

Happy to answer anything in the comments.