![]() ![]() Practice helps the team prepare more easily, and to make better agreements faster. They need to see that their ideas are heard, and that some real change comes out of the meeting. People need to get a feel for what kind of feedback proves useful. These meetings go better and get better results after you’ve done them a few times. Participating effectively takes practice too. Leading a really great retrospective takes skill that you can only gain through experience. Framing guidelines Retrospectives are a Practice. To ensure that your retrospective results in something actually getting better, you’ll end the meeting by creating a specific action plan for improvements. Real change is the ultimate measure of a retrospective’s success. It’s de-motivating, discouraging, and a waste of time. Have you ever worked with a group that talks about their aspirations, problems, and what needs to change, but never actually does anything about any of it? Action planning: identify specific ways to improve future work. As the meeting leader, you have an enormous impact on the success of your retrospective by deciding which questions you’ll ask and how the team shares their answers. In my opinion, this is the most fun and most challenging part of the meeting. Everyone shares what they learned during the project: both the good and the bad. Discuss what worked well and what didn’t. This step ensures everyone gets all the facts straight before they try to solve problems they may only partially understand. If you are reviewing a project as a team, that means it took many people with unique experiences to get to that point. ![]() People will arrive at the retrospective ready to discuss and solve problems, often assuming they know everything they need to know about what happened. It’s important not to skip or rush through this step, especially for larger projects. ![]() In order to come up with useful ideas that everyone can agree on, the team needs a shared understanding of the facts and insight into the parts of the project in which they may not have been involved. Start by reviewing the project facts: goals, timeline, budget, major events, and success metrics. I’ll go into more detail below, but in brief, it looks like this. The process for debriefing a project covers roughly the same topics as the quick after-action discussion. Retrospectives give a team time to reflect on what they learned. There, the classic questions go something like: The Project Retrospective dedicates time to reviewing a completed project and learning from both the successes and the failures so the team and organization can improve how they work going forward.įormalized as the after-action review by the US Army, these meetings ensure a team quickly learns from each engagement. Regardless of what you call them, they all have the same goal and follow the same basic pattern. These meetings go by many names - postmortems, retrospectives, after-action reviews, wrap-ups, project “success” meetings. We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience. ![]()
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