Three Little Pigs – retrospective activity

This retrospective activity is a fun take on the fairy tale, the Three Little Pigs and is a great activity to do with your team at the end of projects or prolonged periods of focussed work.

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How can the three little pigs retrospective help?

When we’re busy we seem to get a bit blinkered and force ourselves to keep racing to the next thing to do. Last year (2020) was a year where I caught myself doing that more than ever. In light of this, I wanted to share an activity to help you reflect, and be a bit more strategic about your next steps…this blog post details the three little pigs retrospective activity and explains how you can use a template with your team.  

Do we all know the story of the three little pigs? I like to use this children’s story as one of the ways to describe how we develop digital projects*.

First we are faced with the problem – we have to build shelter to protect ourselves from the wolf. 

The first thing we try doesn’t work so well, we learn a lot and try again. That was our house of straw that was blown down by the wolf. In a digital project this might be a few tests run on a low cost prototype. 

Now we know that the wolf has some good lungs and we look to build our house of stronger materials – our house of sticks. 

Finally, we get to a point where we’ve built something that can’t be blown down – a robust solution, our house of bricks.

How to use the template

To use the three little pigs retrospective template go to https://padlet.com/bemoredigitaltraining/nbvne1faumda2hgo and click remake. The template has been set up ready for you to use and has step by step instructions too.

This activity was first shared at SCVOs DigiShift on Tuesday 12 Jan 2020, watch the full session including talks by Wayne Murray and John Fitzgerald too!

*This is an adaptation of a fairly well known retrospective activity from Agile Project Management methodologies.