How does the Echometer retrospective software work?

The Echometer retrospective software works as follows:

• Simple preparation of retrospectives using templates for retro formats, surveys and whiteboards
• Intuitive and step-by-step implementation of retrospectives. Possible both online and on-site. Simply use the QR code on site so that participants can take part via their smartphone with the Mobile Companion app.
• Automatic follow-up through export functions and integrated tracking of developments and measures including retro archive.

The implementation of a retrospective in Echometer is as follows:

• The retrospective board allows the agile team to start with a fun welcome screen where they can wait for the rest of the team while playing an interactive game.

• Once all participants of the retrospective have arrived, continue with an icebreaker question. Echometer has several icebreaker question templates, including both open-ended questions and visual whiteboard templates with workshops and small games.
• After the icebreaker, you reach the screen for tracking measures: Here, the team reviews the open actions from past retrospectives and decides whether to keep, close or discard the actions. This step is unique to Echometer and significantly improves the quality of the continuous improvement process of agile teams.
• After that, we continue with the Team Health Check: all team members answer various questions, for example a question about satisfaction in the team or questions about psychological safety. This type of question increases both engagement in the retrospective, even among introverted team members, and the creation of agile KPIs to track the mood in the team over time.
• Then you continue with the retrospective board, where everyone can anonymously leave their feedback on open questions - if this hasn’t already happened in advance via a survey. There are hundreds of retrospective templates for different retrospectives on the Echometer retro board.
• Feedback is first written face down on the retro board so that the participants do not influence each other. The moderator can then reveal the feedback column by column.
• Once the feedback on the retro board has been uncovered, presented to the team and any queries about feedback have been clarified, the prioritization, i.e. the voting, can continue.
• Voting in Echometer is anonymous. During the voting process, you can see how many votes have already been cast and how many are still open.
• At on-site retrospectives, you can also vote using your smartphone.
• As soon as the voting is complete, you can derive measures. To do this, you can either create a measure directly for the feedback or open the feedback on a new whiteboard to analyze the problem in more detail and brainstorm ideas for measures.
• The brainstorming of measures on a separate whiteboard within the retro is a point of differentiation for Echometer compared to other tools for retrospectives such as Parabol. In Echometer, you can create a separate whiteboard for each topic within the retro and thus optimally control the focus of the discussion.
• Finally, Echometer enables the retrospective to be concluded by asking the entire team anonymously on a scale of 0 to 10 for the ROTI score (i.e. the “Return on Time Invested”): This helps the team and in particular the moderator of the retrospective to continuously improve the quality of the retrospectives in the team itself.

Given this unique, structured and flexible retrospective process, combined with the range of functions, Echometer is often described as the best tool for agile retrospectives.