Futurespectives
Futurespectives are the same as retrospectives, but looking forward instead of behind. They can be used to guage uncertainty for upcoming work, pair with a pre-mortem to identify potential future risks - or simply to talk through a large initiative or piece of work with the team.
It isn't part of the Scrum guide, and it isn't standard in the industry - I haven't seen any dev teams I've worked with doing futurespectives, it takes a good deal of preparation to be able to field the kind of questions your devs may ask. It also requires the Product team to be ahead with backlog planning, as the requirements gathering phase (and arguably the discovery phase) should be complete before embarking on a futurespective.
What is a futurespective?
During a futurespective a team will consider the project within the context of things such as –
the skills, expertise and experience of the team members the resources they can access the risks and obstacles they may encounter, and the parameters within which they must work in order to produce
a shared understanding of the project trajectory, and confirm the first steps the team needs to take to get started.
How to run a futurespective?
A lot of the templates for retrospectives can be used for a futurespective. The brief could be one of:
- Consider the project as if it has been delivered
- View the project as if it is to be delivered