Known Issues is a focused retrospective activity for issues that are already known. It is very useful for situations in which the team (1) either knows their issues and wants to talk about the solutions, or (2) keeps on running out of time to talk about repetitive issues that are not the top voted ones.
Running the activity:
- Split the participants into groups of two or three people.
- Ask each group to write down the known issues.
- Group the known issues and read them to the whole group.
- Ask everyone to think about solutions to the known issues, write them on sticky notes (another color than the known issues) and place them next to the known issues.
- Group conversation and action item creation.
The image illustrates this activity in action. On it, you can find the known issues categorized and grouped, as described on step 3, and the proposed solutions (on colored sticky notes), as described on step 4.
We recommends running this activity followed by the Who-What-When check-out activity. This activity is very effective for project rescue situations, in which the issues list is well known.
Remote-team advice: This activity works well for remote teams. Use a remote board of your choice.