Are you looking to organize retrospective meetings? Parabol Review: I’ll be sharing the pros and cons of this popular tool. It could be the right product to help your agile team.
Summary
What is Parabol?
How to host a retrospectiveReflection round
Grouping
Voting
Integrations
Your DashboardFuture Agendas
Personalization and setting up
Is Parabol completely free?
Pros
Cons
Parabol Review: SummaryPin for later reading:
Summary
Parabol
Cost and plans: Up to 2 teams can get a free plan
Hosting model: Cloud or on-premise
Languages: The interface can be used in English, but you can also use any input language
Website: https://www.parabol.co/
Summary Review of Parabol: This tool is a great alternative to Retrium and Funretro. It can be used by remote agile retrospective teams. Parabol is an alternative to Retrium or Funretro.
Parabol is an online tool for retrospective meetings that is free.
It’s an efficient way to manage your meetings online if you work in agile teams or do regular retrospectives.
How to host a Retrospective
You can invite people to your Parabol retrospective as a host by providing a link. They can access their dashboard easily and show up at your meeting on time.
You can create templates to organize meetings so that your sessions are set up exactly how you want them to be.
One of the over 200 icebreakers is what you will see when you join the retrospective. You, the host, can choose what questions you want to ask so you can mix it up.
You can run your icebreaker around (or disable it if you prefer) before moving on to the main part.
Reflection round
Set the timer to reflect. Then, have your meeting attendees take down their feedback to the retrospective. Parabol has space to record both what is working and where people are stuck.
Reflections can be anonymous so that you can address difficult truths, but also avoid anchoring to any other ideas or topics.
Grouping
Next, the team meets together to discuss the input and brainstorm ideas. Parabol’s AI automatically suggests headings based on the contents of the cards. However, you can change these to suit your needs.
If you have any other ideas, you can continue to brainstorm in the grouping section. You can all grab the cards and move them around so that you can work together.
Once the team is satisfied that the cards are grouped, you can vote.
Voting
It’s easy to vote on the topics that require more discussion time. Click thumbs up or down.
Each member of the team gets 5 votes by default, but the facilitator can change this to any other number you feel is appropriate. Each person can vote for a single topic up to three times. Again, this setting can be changed by the facilitator to give more or less votes.
My children would tell you that this was done with stickers on flipcharts. This caused chaos and disruption in the meeting room with everyone trying to get to one piece of flipchart paper. Online voting is quicker and less likely to be influenced or influenced by your colleagues’ votes. This allows you to get a more honest result.
Next, the interface displays the reflections on the most popular topics so you can have your discussion and turn the output into tasks.
Parabol emails you a summary after the meeting has ended. This is useful for people who cannot resist using their inboxes as To Do lists.
Integrations
Parabol interfaces to Jira so you can add your tasks automatically into your main collaboration tool, Jira task management.
Integrations are possible with Slack and GitHub.
You can export the meeting data to a.csv file so that you can import it into other tools.
Your Dashboard
Your tasks are updated on your Parabol dashboard after the meeting. It looks like a Kanban board, with columns for past/backlog tasks, work that has been completed, active tasks, and comple.