That’s why we have developed a platform that helps teams run effective retrospectives and stay connected, even when working remotely. Our tools are designed to streamline the retrospective process, making it easier for teams to focus on what really matters – improving their performance and achieving their goals. Retrospectives are powerful tools that can help teams improve their performance, identify problems and work collaboratively to develop solutions.

As the team brainstorms actions, Bob draws a single horizontal line on the whiteboard. On the left hand side of the line he writes the word “Low Impact” and on the right hand side of the line he writes the word “High Impact”. When you’re in a rush, it may seem like skipping this last phase of the retrospective is okay. Now that you have mapped out the Impact, Effort, and Energy of each potential action, the team can discuss which action makes the most sense. For example, an action that has low effort, high impact, and high energy, would be a great candidate to commit to. An action that has high effort, low impact, and low energy, is likely one you should skip.

How to Successfully Run A Project Retrospective Meeting

💡 For more information, check out How to Run an Asynchronous Retrospective. No team is perfect at everything, not even the high-performing ones. Identifying these strengths and weaknesses will help you accentuate these strengths, work around the shortcomings, and help turn your group into a high-performing and efficient unit.

Also, specify the responsibilities and timelines for each task. Once that’s done, you should create a clear sprint retrospective meeting agenda that shows project retrospective how you intend to run each section of the meeting. This way, the meeting will progress faster and there will be no need to carry any issue forward.

The vital three things you need to deliver a project

It seems there’s a lot of room for improvement in that area,” asks Bob. When you’ve generated a list of potential actions, it can be difficult to know which one to work on next. A more powerful way is to use Impact, Effort, and Energy mapping. Now, if the team had jumped right into the rest of the retrospective, they might have been annoyed at Jeff’s negative attitude.

You can suggest to team members to keep logs or make diary-type entries in a notebook or online in order to keep track of how they feel about the project as it unfolds. It’s difficult to recall specific things that worked well or that needed improvement at the end of a project. I have participated in retrospectives facilitated by project managers, by team or project leaders and by managers.

Questions to Ask in Retrospectives

This section gives you insight into how each member of your team thinks and perceives problems. You also get to gauge their ability to come up with innovative solutions. A retrospective meeting, or retro, is a structured session that gives teams time to reflect on a completed project.

Make sure to confirm that data is accurate before presenting it in the retrospective. The nature of a retrospective as a blame-free exercise also contrasts with the goal of a post-mortem, which is to identify failure points. The latter often involves pinpointing the teams or people responsible for poor outcomes. The atmosphere in a post-mortem may be more politicized as a result. The term post-mortem derives from the Latin words for “after death” and traditionally refers to an autopsy that determines a patient’s cause of death.

• Great managers or leaders are constantly looking for ways to improve and iterate and you can’t strive for greatness if you don’t take the time to review or draw conclusions.
• The real work of your sprint retrospective starts with the action plan.
• You can go around in a circle or call on specific people as needed.
• Retrospectives are sometimes called post-project reviews, debriefings, or post-mortems (even when the project survived!).
• If this is a weekly meeting, our Weekly Team Retrospective template (set for a 30 minute max length) is a great place to start.

Many come from the Agile software development community, but the practices apply no matter what kind of project you run. You can’t practically tackle all of them at once, so now’s the time to focus in on those 3 to 5 things that will have the biggest impact. In the software community, we see a lot of emphasis on ensuring the retrospective is about sharing insights and learning, and not about placing blame, venting, or working out your interpersonal issues. You’re asking the team to reflect on their experience, pull out key learnings, and turn that into tangible change.

Another great way to act on project retrospective insights is by updating resources people use for their daily work at the end of a completed project. It takes a few minutes to update operational procedures, templates, and checklists, but those efforts can have a big impact. When the army uses AARs, they explicitly link lessons to future actions. All project retro meeting types can benefit from this practice. After all, it’s no use identifying learnings if you’re not going to implement them. To run a post-mortem, start by reviewing the timeline of events that led to an incident or project failure.