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Related: 5 Tips for Holding Effective Post-Mortems Who benefits from a project retrospective?Įveryone who’s been involved in the project will benefit from a retrospective because it’s designed to help the team work more efficiently and improve over time. If you run retrospectives at the end of each sprint, they help you monitor project progress at regular intervals. Project retrospectives can be run at the end of a project or at the end of Agile sprints, which may happen multiple times throughout a project timeline depending on the length or complexity of the project. It’s most often used by agile teams following the Agile methodology, but it’s also helpful for any team looking to reflect on project progress and encourage continuous improvement. What is a project retrospective?Ī project retrospective is a process where a project team reflects on a completed project and looks for opportunities to improve the way they work together in the future. Candidly discuss what went well, what didn’t, and where you see potential for better processes or outcomes in future work together.
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Mark the hits and misses (for example, you could bold the hits and strikethrough the misses), adding notes in the appropriate Results column. Ideally, people are taking notes during the project itself, not just waiting until the Retrospective. This can also happen asynchronously before the full-group meeting. People should take their own notes in this phase rather than use the shared template, so that everyone has the opportunity to do their own thinking.
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High-level learning and immediate next steps. To use, click on this link to open Google Docs, then select File > Make a copy… in the menu. It is a critical part of the learning process.įor bigger projects, we use this Google Doc template for retrospectives. In its simplest form, the Retrospective captures what went well, what could have been improved, and the changes to make for next time. The Retrospective is an opportunity to debrief projects, make meaning of what happened together, and document lessons learned.
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