Creating Retrospective Action Plans

Retrospectives are an important space for your team to come together to share learnings, celebrate wins and reflect.

But those learnings and ideas for improvement need to be applied if we're to continuously improve.

The Action column in the Retrospective enables you to create the tasks to implement what you’ve learnt.

There are two ways to create action items in this column:

Action items that live only in the Retrospective page
Action items that are also Jira issues

In-app action items

Action items can be easily created in the Action column of any Retrospective.

Screenshot of app where user is creating an item in the Action column with the text Schedule recurring calendar event for coffee

Assign these tasks to someone in your team to make sure they get done.

You can delete this kind of action item from the right-click or “ellipsis” menu.

Or, you can convert it to a Jira issue.

GIF of using the ellipsis menu item Convert to Jira issue to change a retrospective action item

Who can I assign these action items to?

Anyone with “Assign Issue” permission on any project in the Jira board can be assigned to an action item.

On Data Center and Server versions before 10.0.0, only people who have “Assign Issue” permission in all the projects in your Jira board can be assigned action items.

For example, say your coworker Charlie can be assigned issues in project ABC. If the board you’re using includes project ABC and project XYZ, then Charlie won’t appear in this dropdown if you’re using an earlier version of the Easy Agile TeamRhythm app.

“Assign Issue” permission is controlled by the Permissions Scheme applied to your project in Jira. Learn more about this in Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center and Server.

Converting action items to Jira issues

When creating an action item, you can choose to convert it to a Jira issue. This makes it easy to add this work to your upcoming plans.

Screenshot of creating a retrospective action item in the app, selecting an epic called Teamwork improvements and a sprint named Sprint 3

Add details here to help make this improvement happen:

Select a suitable issue type from your Jira project(s)
Link the action item to an Epic so you can find it in your Backlog or User Story Map
On Scrum boards, schedule it in an upcoming sprint

In Easy Agile TeamRhythm for Jira Data Center or Jira Server, you’ll need to update to version 9+ or the app to set epic and sprint here. Read more information about version 9.0.0 here.

On any version, you can always open the Jira issue to see and update these fields.

Then, track the progress of the issue with:

Editable estimate (on Scrum boards)
Visible assignee
Status category indicator

Screenshot of a retrospective acton item assigned to developer Jake with estimate of one story point

Screenshot of retrospective action item with status Done and crossed-out issue key

You can also open this issue in Jira and edit any other Jira fields such as description, components, labels, and issue links.

Assignees and Watchers for this Jira issue will receive email notifications according to the Notification Scheme applied to your Project. Learn more about Notification Schemes in Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center and Server.

Existing action items can be also converted to Jira issues.

Where exactly is the issue created in Jira?

When converting a new or existing action item to a Jira issue, you’ll need to select:

The project to create it in (if your Jira board filter includes more than one project) and
A standard-level issue type from that project

If there are other required fields configured in Jira, you’ll be prompted to fill these in next.

While this controls the project the issue is in, it could be missing from your Jira board if you have a complex board filter. Learn more about multi-project boards, required fields and other impacts of the Board Filter Query.

Note that deleting the issue in Jira will also delete the action item on the Retrospective page.

Create an action item from another item

Use the “lightbulb” button on any retrospective item to create an action item based on that idea.

GIF where user clicks Take an action on a retrospective feedback to continue syncing daily over coffee, and type out an action item that then appears in the Action column

Show or hide the Action column

You can hide the Action column from the “Actions” button in the header. This can be useful when you’re focussing on adding feedback to other columns and aren’t yet creating Actions.

Note that this won’t hide the column on other people’s screens.

Who can see action items?

If you’re using a private retrospective, action items are still visible to other users.