Agile Retrospectives for Projects and Sprints

AnAgile project retrospective(also called asprint 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.

What is aretrospective? In a retrospective, team members discuss the practices they have employed regarding their recent work — what has gone well, what needs improving, and what lessons they can learn. The work they examine may span a certain time period, such as two weeks (the length of a sprint), or focus on a specific project phase or milestone, such as contract negotiations.

The retrospective happens at intervals while the work is still underway, so the team can make refinements during the next work period.

A retrospective is important in Agile because it fulfills a primary Agile principle: continuous improvement. Because the retrospective occurs while work is unfolding, the team has the opportunity to catch problems early and correct them.

Retrospectives espouse many concepts that are central to Agile principles. Such concepts include the following: welcoming change; supporting individuals and trusting them to accomplish the work; viewing face-to-face conversations as the most effective way to communicate; working toward sustainability; and encouraging self-organizing teams. (You canlearn about all Agile principles and values in our comprehensive guide.)

Agile sprint retrospectives help you work toward the ideals above by allowing you to create the optimal conditions for a team to thrive. In order to reap the benefits of Agile sprint retrospectives, be sure to do the following:

• Make continuous improvement a reality.
• Promote stronger, honest communication.
• Offer a framework for creating change.
• Create a habit of expressing appreciation and acknowledging success.
• Provide opportunities for the team and individuals to learn and grow.
• Enable team members to share and pass on their experiences.
• Initiate changes that the team can implement right away.
• Build a culture free of blame.
• Add accountability to action plans.

Retrospectives and post-mortems both illustrate how work went. But they have different stakeholders, objectives, timing, and output. The post-mortem manager looks at a completed project or project phase, and their highest priority is to understand mistakes and failure points.

The termpost-mortemderives from the Latin words for “after death” and traditionally refers to an autopsy that determines a patient’s cause of death. The objective of a post-mortem meeting is to prevent mistakes from recurring and to mitigate risks. The output of a project post-mortem is usually a report that includes data and evidence about the causes of the project result. You can learn more about post-mortems, including how to run a post-mortem, in thisessential guide to post-mortems in business.

Retrospectives occur frequently throughout the project lifecycle or at each iteration, not just at the end. The objective of holding a retrospective is to help the team discover ways to improve incrementally. Conducting a retrospective usually results in one or two action items for implementation.

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.

Management drives the post-mortem, due to their need to understand success and failure factors from a high-level perspective, although project teams also participate. Other departments and stakeholders from across the organization may also take part. By contrast, retrospectives occur within the team and usually have an informal atmosphere.

You should conduct a project retrospective because it offers a structured way to improve your team functions by incorporating lessons from successes and stumbles.

What is aproject retrospective? In a project retrospective, project team members identify strengths and inefficiencies and share ideas to promote better performance. The retrospective ends with concrete plans to put a few steps into action. These processes help the members of your team learn to communicate more effectively with one another.

A project retrospective yields the following direct and indirect benefits:

• It strengthens accountability for team success.
• It improves future work.
• It increases mutual trust and honesty.
• It boosts morale.
• It makes the work feel more meaningful.
• It helps team members recognize their interdependence.
• It helps team members learn from experience.
• It helps team members embrace change as positive.
• It helps team members understand one another better.
• It fosters team and individual growth.

In today’s business and technology landscape, change is pervasive. The retrospective method is effective because it helps a team adapt more easily and quickly to change.

Retrospective hallmarks, such as striving for honesty in a blame-free environment, bring important ideas into the open, making them actionable.

The retrospective practice of focusing on central questions — what is working well and what needs improvement — produces greater value and keeps the team’s attention on what matters most.

Done correctly, retrospectives are also effective because they occur frequently and allow the team to implement and test potential solutions. With each new retrospective, the group can look back and see how these solutions worked at the last retrospective. In such an environment, work patterns and processes do not become rigid or stale.

A retrospective has a standard structure. The meeting proceeds through six steps or phases. The two most important of these are reviewing how the recent work has gone and brainstorming ways to improve the team’s processes.

Our step-by-step guide on running a results-oriented retrospective gives detailed instructions on how to prepare for and lead a retrospective meeting. This guide includes in-depth discussion of each phase.

Many retrospective facilitators like to structure the meeting around an activity such as Mad Sad Glad or Start Stop Continue. These exercises ask participants to categorize aspects of their project/sprint experience under one of three categories. Check outour rundown on Agile games, ideas, and activities for retrospectivesfor inspiration.

Here are the six phases of a retrospective:

1. Introduction:Go through the ground rules, and perform a safety check or an icebreaker.
2. Review:Gather information on what’s working well and what’s challenging. Use activities such as Mad Sad Glad to structure this process.
3. Brainstorming:Solicit suggestions on how to address the most important points that came up in the review.
4. Prioritizing:Narrow down the list to the most impactful two or three suggestions.
5. Action Planning:Decide who will implement the actions and how.
6. Closing:Summarize and get feedback on how the retrospective went.

During the review part of the meeting, you should use data wherever possible to validate team reports of successes and setbacks. Hard data is very helpful. But soft data can also provide a lot of crucial information, such as the team’s level of burnout or sense of job satisfaction.

Hard data is a good way to document trends in productivity and quality. You can measure and track the following numbers for each sprint period or project step:

• The percentage of work that the team has achieved by this point vs. the percentage of work that the team had originally set out to achieve by this point
• Aburndown chartshowing the amount of work that remains vs. the amount of time that remains in which to complete that work
• The number of software story points the team has coded or the number of project activities it has accomplished
• The number of software bugs the team has fixed or the error rate
• The cycle time
• The velocity or rate of progress
• The amount of time the team has spent in meetings

Do not share any data that is related to a specific person or that ranks individual performance. Make sure to confirm that data is accurate before presenting it in the retrospective.

Gather soft data by giving questionnaires to your team on a recurring basis. Have members rate the following on a numerical scale: mood, job satisfaction, sense of fatigue or burnout, etc. While the results of these surveys are not foolproof, they do a good job of making trends visible. These polls also provide a way for the team to air any negative feelings, rather than letting them fester.

Holding an effective retrospective takes preparation. If you are the facilitator, make a plan. Allot enough time for the meeting, so you aren’t rushed. And think about how you will create an environment where team members can share their learning.

Holding retrospectives that deliver value is a team-oriented process that requires frequent repetition, so consistency is important. Make sure to follow the same sequence of events at each meeting: introduction, review, brainstorming, prioritizing, action planning, and closing. Plan what you’re going to say and what you and your team are going to do. Put effort into building trust and fostering a feeling of psychological safety with mood checks and icebreakers.

Plan a successful retrospective by following these steps:

1. Schedule Enough Time for the Meeting to Generate Valuable Insights:But don’t make the retrospective so long that the team dreads it. Allot about 30 minutes for each week of work you’re reviewing.
2. Plan the Content and Activities for Each Section of the Retrospective:In advance of every meeting, make sure you have all the necessary materials (e.g., supplies, posters, snacks).
3. Cultivate an Atmosphere of Trust and Candor:Incorporate safety and mood checks. Make it clear that the retrospective will be free of blame.
4. Make Time to Celebrate Wins and Successes:The retrospective looks at how the team can work better together. But the process should also acknowledge what’s already working well. Make sure to give equal focus to the ways in which the team can improve and the areas in which the group shows strength. Taking the time to recognize and appreciate members of your team is crucial to motivating them.
5. Remote Teams Need Extra TLC:Cultivating a bond among members of remote and distributed teams is challenging. Think about how to inspire trust, collaboration, and a sense of comfort among a group of people who aren’t in the same room together. Be sure to consider culture, language, and time-zone differences.

Check out this detailed guide on how to facilitate a project retrospective.

Download Agile Retrospective Template

Microsoft WordIAdobe PDFISmartsheet

Use this standard retrospective template to quickly get your meeting up and running. The template provides sections for answers to these key questions: What went well? What could have gone better? What will we try next? What questions do we have?

The most common problems that can arise during a project retrospective include repetition, inconsistency, scapegoating, and more. Making such mistakes can render a retrospective wholly ineffective, leaving team members feeling demoralized.

To conduct a successful project retrospective (i.e., one that leads to meaningful improvements), avoid the most common mistakes:

• Accusatory:When your retrospective focuses on who is at fault, your meeting cannot be successful. A retrospective only works when no one feels personally attacked. Creating psychological safety and sharing a common understanding of the ground rules are both essential to a successful retrospective.
• Boring:When the retrospective is unengaging, team members tune out and try to avoid attending.
• Hasty:When you don’t allot the appropriate amount of time for the meeting, you set up the retrospective for failure. To calculate the amount of time you need for each meeting, use this rule of thumb: 30 minutes for each week of work you’re reviewing.
• Imbalanced:当你会产生太多的行动步骤,your team feels overwhelmed. And when your meeting doesn’t produce enough steps, your team feels unproductive. Create a balance regarding action items in order to give your team realistic goals, as well as the potential for meaningful progress.
• Inconsistent:When you perform retrospectives only sporadically, you send a message to your team: These meetings are not a priority. The value of a retrospective lies in its potential to generate continuous improvement via regularly scheduled meetings.
• Inert:When the retrospectives aren’t generating results (possibly because of inadequate follow-through), there is little reason to hold the meetings.
• Meaningless:If you let the retrospective become merely an empty, box-checking exercise, your team members cease to invest in the process.
• Negative:If you focus only on the negative, you sap the team of motivation.
• Repetitive:If you’re revisiting the same issues at every retrospective, you need to improve your action planning so that your steps have impact.
• Too Late:If you conduct a retrospective after you’ve already completed your project, then it’s too late to apply what you’ve learned in order to improve the work.
• Untrusting:When participants do not feel they can be honest, they aren’t willing to share their best ideas and sincere reflections.
• Whiny:When you allow a retrospective to devolve into a complaint session, you waste time and, worse, permit the spread of negativity.

If your retrospectives fall into one of the mistake patterns mentioned above, don’t despair. You can improve by diagnosing the problem and implementing solutions. Start by holding a retrospective about your retrospectives.

在这个会话,从团队获取信息the meetings could improve, as well as action steps to achieve those improvements. Another way to diagnose any issues is to join your team’s retrospective as an observer and assign someone else to facilitate. From this new perspective, see if any problems become evident to you.

If your meetings are dull, consider varying the activities, trying a new facilitator or location, and incorporating fun games and themes. You can also ask team members to vote on discussion topics and activities.

For teams that struggle with candor, explore ways to improve the sense of safety. Try activities that strengthen listening skills and encourage participation from people who tend to hold back. These strategies can be helpful.

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.

Get detailed guidance on making your retrospectives better with these tips for improving your sprint retrospective and preventing boredom.

The Agile practice of holding retrospectives flowed from theAgile Manifesto, developed in 2001 by a group of developers, practitioners, and leaders of different software frameworks.

TheAgile Manifesto’s12th principle provides the reasoning behind retrospectives: A team needs to reflect regularly on how to become more effective and then adjust its process accordingly.

According to the Agile Alliance, this idea of reflecting on an increment of work first appeared in 1997, in U.S. computer scientist Alistair Cockburn’s bookSurviving Object-Oriented Projects. He summarized the process this way: “Work in increments. Focus after each.” Cockburn’s informal description of this practice would soon evolve into the termretrospective.

According to the Agile Alliance, project and iteration retrospectives started to become common around 2003. The publication of the seminal bookAgile Retrospectivesin 2006 codified retrospective practices.

The first edition of theScrum Guidein 2010 described sprint retrospectives and made them a fixture among Scrum practitioners, thus widening the practice’s user base. (Scrum is one of the most popular Agile methodologies.) In subsequent editions, the guide has refined the roles and processes of retrospectives.

By the early 2010s, the success of Agile methods in software development motivated other industries — including media, auto manufacturing, marketing, and human resources — to adopt this approach. As these businesses embraced Agile, project teams in non-technical fields started making retrospectives a regular part of their practices.

From simple task management and project planning to complex resource and portfolio management, Smartsheet helps you improve collaboration and increase work velocity -- empowering you to get more done.

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.Try Smartsheet for free, today.