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Conduct Project Retrospectives - Post Project Reviews
September 27, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Lessons Learned, Project Management Best Practices
Conduct Project Retrospectives (Post Project Reviews) (#22 in the series 21 Project Management Success Tips)
By Karl E. Wiegers
Retrospectives (also called postmortems or post-project reviews) provide an opportunity for the team to reflect on how the last project or the previous phase went and to capture lessons learned that will help enhance your future performance. During such a review, identify the things that went well, so you can create an environment that enables you to repeat those success contributors. Also look for things that didn’t go so well, so you can change your approaches and prevent those problems in the future. In addition, think of events that surprised you. These might be risk factors for which you should be alert on the next project.
Conduct retrospectives in a constructive, honest atmosphere. Don’t make them an opportunity to assign blame for previous problems. Capture the lessons learned from each review and share them with the entire team and organization, so all can benefit from your painfully gained experience. I like to write lessons learned in a neutral way, such that it isn’t obvious whether we learned the lesson because we did something right or because we made a mistake.
This tip and the previous 20 project management tips won’t guarantee success, but they will help you get a solid handle on your project and ensure that you’re doing all you can to make it succeed in an unpredictable world.
Adapted from “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools” (Microsoft Press, 2007). A condensed version of this paper was published in Software Development magazine.
Karl Wiegers, Ph.D., is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software process consulting and education company in Portland, Oregon. Karl’s most recent book is “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools.” Karl is also the author of four other books and 170 articles. Karl is a frequent speaker at software conferences and professional society meetings. You can reach Karl through www.projectinitiation.com or www.processimpact.com.
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