How to Facilitate Great Project Retrospectives

Project retrospectives provide teams the ability to stop and reflect on their past performance so they can improve their results. The objective is to identify concrete action items that improve performance in the next phase or iteration.

Retrospectives should be conducted at regular intervals throughout the project lifecycle - while projects are “in-flight” – so that action items can be immediately applied.

Click here to download a free retrospective presentation template.

Benefits of Project Retrospectives

Project retrospectives provide teams at the project, program and portfolio levels with a means to systematically remove barriers and generate actionable improvements that:

Reduce cycle time and waste
Improve client satisfaction
Reduce risk of “blowups”, surprises and wasted investment
Improve team effectiveness
Provide professional development opportunities for team members

Keys to Success

Perhaps the single most important measure of the effectiveness of a retrospective is whether or not a team follows through on the action items with which they agreed-upon in the session. This usually means that the session needs to be.

Engaging and thought-provoking
Useful to the team
Non-threatening
Development-oriented
Gets to the "real issues"

Above all, teams need to feel like their time is well spent. Experience has shown that the retrospective facilitator needs to:

Mix things up so they don’t become routine
Get to the root causes of issues by asking the tough questions
Explain the reasons why continuous improvements are important for the team and its stakeholders

Click here to learn more about a book aimed at helping people learn how to facilitate great project retrospectives.

The Project Retrospective Agenda

The agenda for retrospectives will usually include the following:

Review what was intended to be achieved
Review of what was actually delivered
Problem-solving to identify the root causes of key issues that were encountered
Action planning to agree on action items that will be applied in the next phase, iteration or time period

sample retrospective agenda

Use Lean Principles to Establish a Driving Force for Improvement

Each retrospective session agenda should focus on ways to eliminate waste, provide increasing levels of value, trim cycle time or improve customer satisfaction. The principles of lean operations are particularly useful, as they focus attention on sources of waste, delays, rework, defects and other impediments to the continuous flow of work.

lean principles for retrospectives