Which Agile Coach or Scrum Master doesn't know it. The participants in the retrospectives or other meetings leave the impression that the time outside the meeting is better invested than in the meeting itself. But to make the meetings worthwhile, you need to be able to clearly identify when participants like the meetings and when they like them less. And that's exactly what the roti score (return on time invested) is for.
Roti (return on time invested) briefly explained:
What is Roti (retun on time invested)?
Roti, or the Roti Score, is a subjective metric that indicates how good it felt to spend time in a meeting or activity.
Or more simply: If you think a meeting is very productive for the time it took, then it has a high Roti-Score. If the meeting was more like "well", then it gets a rather low Roti-Score.
As you can see in this picture, it takes place automatically and also indicates again how long the retrospective has lasted. – In this way, it is possible to remember conversations that may have been lost and that may have been a time-consuming part of the meeting. At the end, the question is always: How long did the meeting last and what could I take away from it?
For example, if 5 people participated in the retro and gave the following roti scores (5,7,7,8,8) then you can determine the average value here ((5+7+7+8+8)/5 = 7) and then get the average roti score.
This is the right way to work with the Roti-Score (return on time invested):
At this point I would like to give you an interesting insight into the interpretation of the Roti-Score. Because believe me, working well with key figures is anything but easy.
Now let's take our example result (5,7,7,8,8) through our roti query again.
What can you interpret out of this? – Nothing!
Yes, it's true that one person gave it a "5", but that doesn't mean he really thought the retro was worse than someone who gave it a 7.
Sounds illogical at first, but with subjective perception it is a fatal mistake to compare different people with each other. – For example, I worked out this metric myself with different teams and what I found out here was pretty interesting:
You can probably guess, but every character is different and there are those for whom a "7" in the Roti score was already a rather bad retro and those for whom everything above "5" is an absolute success. And that's exactly why I like to talk to each participant for a minute at the end of each retro, to get a feel for what a certain number actually means to that person. – By the way, the same is true for different teams. Please don't use the Roti-Score to compare teams, because there are so many parameters involved that you can't tell if an "8" for one team is better, the same or even worse than a "7" for another team.
But now let's take a look at what interesting information can be gleaned from the Roti-Score.
How do the team and the individual team players develop?
As you can see in this image, we measure the Roti score in each retro and can really see long-term trends in the teams. Here, for example, we can see that the team is already so well-rehearsed that we can deliver a pretty stable performance and are always around a 9/10.
In the second image, on the other hand, you can see a team that has only recently incorporated retrospectives into its routine. And what you can quickly see here is that the first team awards a whole point more on average than the second. The funny thing is, however, that the above-mentioned phenomenon actually occurs here, that the retros do not de facto run worse, but team #2 Simply handles the scoring a bit more conservatively. – What you can really see with Team #2, however, is that the retros are perceived as somewhat less valuable from month to month. The "return on time invested" is dropping.
From here on, the real magic begins: because now you have to find out what caused Team #2 to see a downward trend.
Spoiler: The duration of retrospectives has increased. – So it seems like the increasing duration of retros for team #2 is causing the return on time invested to decrease.
Important: This is first a hypothesis, which again needs to be tested. So we have concluded in the team to restrict the meeting time and will see in the coming retros what effect it will have on the Roti score.
Using this method, we at Echometer have already analyzed a total of more than 30,000 retrospectives from more than 100 companies and have been able to make incredibly interesting observations.
One, for example, is that most retrospectives are held on a Wednesday, even though the Roti score is highest on Fridays:
If you are interested in the evaluation and the resulting learnings, feel free to read our article: "Analysis of 30k retros: 4 tips for agile teams”
Conclusion on Roti (Return on time invested)
I hope I could give you a little more clarity in dealing with the Roti-Score with this article.
However, if you don't feel like tracking the Roti-Score or the many other metrics that give you more insight into your teams and their development opportunities, then feel free to try out Echometer. You can test the tool completely free of charge and get a simple overview of, for example, the Roti-Score and many other key figures without additional effort.
