Start the fourth quarter with a look back
2026-10-01 · The Scrums team
October 1 opens the last quarter of the year. Before you plan it, spend an hour on what the last one taught you.
Today is the first day of the fourth quarter, and for a lot of teams that means planning: goals for the rest of the year, a roadmap to finish, a budget to set. It's tempting to start with the plan. Start with the last three months instead.
A quarter is long enough for patterns to show that a two-week sprint hides: the same blocker coming back, a process everyone quietly works around, a win nobody stopped to notice. An hour on those makes the plan you write next more honest.
A quarter-end retro that works
- Pick a format that looks wide. Plan vs. Actual compares what you meant to do with what happened, and asks why there's a gap. Sailboat asks what pushed you forward, what held you back, and what's ahead. Both are built into Scrums, beside classics like Start · Stop · Continue and 4 Ls.
- Write alone first. Everyone writes their own cards before anyone reads anyone else's. In Scrums, other people's cards stay face-down until the facilitator reveals them, so the first idea on the board doesn't set the tone for the rest.
- Vote, then talk. Dot voting ranks the topics, so the discussion starts with what the team cares about most, not with whatever was raised first.
- Leave with a few owned actions. Three action items with an owner and a due date do more than twelve with neither.
Then check what happened to them
The real test of a quarter-end retro is whether anything changes. Scrums brings open action items into the next retro's Review step, so the team sees what got done before it writes anything new. My action items shows each person what's theirs, and an email reminder arrives when one is nearly due.
If you want a baseline too, run a health check this week and another at the end of December. The team's Health tab charts every area across its checks, so you'll see whether the quarter moved anything.
Try a retro in your browser with no account, or sign up and run your quarter-end retro today. Scrums is free, every feature of it.
More on running retrospectives in Scrums, and a guide to the Plan vs. Actual format.