The change can be big if the person responsible has the time and authority to put it in action. But if not, get creative and go for the quick win that the team can control. Perform the steps below to conduct a project retrospective meeting.. You may try the steps interactively by visiting the interactive product tour. To simplify facilitating a retrospective, download the complete starter kit below. You can make retrospectives more effective by holding them consistently, setting aside an appropriate amount of time, rightsizing your list of action items, and following through on those items.
- You will be armed with a high level of insights and information when you sit down to plan your next project with other stakeholders, department heads, executives, other teams, or clients.
- An agile retrospective template can help spark some ideas for how to display and organize everyone’s insights and begin building them into actions for your next iteration.
- After reflecting on what happened during the project, use those reflections to plan for the future.
- These agile retrospective ideas will help you mix up your meetings and keep your team engaged.
- But there’s one quality that all good project managers have – they analyze their projects to prevent problems and then they analyze them again to learn from their mistakes.
If team members are hesitant to open up, try easing the tension with small talk, games, or fun themes. Simply put, this exercise frames the conversation around what to start, stop, and continue doing based on goals and resources. Set aside time to clean up and reorganize the scrum board in your development tool.
How Do You Facilitate a Project Retrospective?
This approach allows teams to become more effective over time by continuously making small improvements to their practices. Learn more about Agile project management, best practices, and tools. An Agile project retrospective (also called a sprint retrospective) is a meeting in which a team assesses its work processes and brainstorms improvements. This meeting happens during the life of a project and often occurs every two weeks. When you do retrospectives every two weeks, they’ll start to feel redundant. Your team might settle into a rhythm that lets them coast through the retrospective without putting in the deep thinking that makes them most effective.
If you are reviewing a project as a team, that means it took many people with unique experiences to get to that point. This step ensures everyone gets all the facts straight before they try to solve problems they may only partially understand. Formalized as the after-action review by the US Army, these meetings ensure a team quickly learns from each engagement. Go through the essential activities of reviewing, brainstorming, prioritizing solutions, and closing out the meeting by summarizing action plans. Make sure everyone understands that the goal of the meeting is to come away with concrete action plans.
Don’t hold back on criticism
The format of each project retrospective is slightly different, but you can benefit from these seven tips no matter what format you choose. Projects, like people, only have post-mortems when something has gone horribly wrong. Turn to this meeting type when you want to get to the bottom of a critical issue. Perhaps this was a project with a very ambitious scope that you managed to deliver on. Maybe you initially thought this was an easy job that would be completed far sooner than it was. Retros can be the perfect way to recap the entire process and help you better understand if your and your team’s prior expectations were accurate or not.
