Retrospectives in project teams: what is it, why is it needed and how to effectively conduct

Our team develops a large number of training projects and our own products. We are constantly analyzing and improving development processes, exchanging feedback with each other and implementing changes. Therefore, after each completed project, we conduct a retrospective with the team, and sometimes separately with customers.

A retrospective is a post-project team meeting to take stock, share lessons learned, and plan for future improvements.

Why retrospectives are needed

We went to the answer to this question for some time and formulated the following points for ourselves:

1. “Close” a project emotionally and move on to a new one. This is an important psychological moment, since employees are working on other projects in parallel. Therefore, it is advisable not to delay the retrospective, after which it will be easier to move on.
2. See the process from the outside and understand what needs to be changed. If, after several reflections, a gap in the development becomes noticeable, then we make a decision about changes in the processes or think about how to make adjustments to them.
3. Make sure once again that the team is doing everything right. It is important not only to look for points of improvement, but also to discuss with the team that the development processes are going well and we continue to do the same in new projects.

Conducting retrospectives with a moderator

Initially, we met with the project team and the head of the development department and freely discussed the project, drew conclusions and recorded important insights for development. But over time, we have updated the format of retrospectives and have been holding them together as a moderator for over a year now. Also, since March 2020, due to a change in the work format, we began to conduct online retrospectives in Skype, GoogleMeets or Zoom.



Moderators are employees of our LEVEL company with a background of a psychologist, trainer or teacher. Also, any employee who has a desire and interest to develop in this role can become a moderator.

What does the moderator do in the meeting?

• Helps the team to structure the discussion
• Keeps track of all project participants to have their say

, , .

At the moment, we have formed a team of moderators, which is improving the formats and looking for new tools for holding retrospectives.



So, in April, the moderators and I found various solutions for online collaboration. To do this, we studied interactive and virtual whiteboards and settled on Miro, prepared in it a whiteboard template for a retrospective.











Now we have come to the conclusion that there is not enough uniform form to fill out based on the results of retrospectives and decided to create it.



At the end of almost every project, we conduct a retrospective. If the project is long and voluminous, we recommend managers to hold additional meetings at the end of its individual stages and summarize mini-results.



Also, over time, we came to the conclusion that we leave the conduct of a retrospective in typical projects for us to the discretion of the manager. As a rule, in these cases, no new questions arise in the development, everything goes by the standard processes.

Implementation of changes based on retrospective results

The systematic holding of retrospectives allowed us to accumulate data on the development of projects. So that valuable information is not lost after retrospectives, the project manager fills out a form following the meeting, where he enters all the team's findings. Further, the heads of departments and the manager of internal projects work with this data.

, , . , .

We also included in the development process a mandatory check of the methodologist and designer at the assembly stage, as we found that this was not enough.



Conclusions and retrospective analysis help not only find design gaps, but also confirm that everything is going well. For example, during a discussion of one of the projects, we concluded that connecting a developer at the stage of writing an e-course script is a successful experience that allows us to reduce the technical risks of project implementation.



The LEVEL retrospective process is fine-tuned, information and conclusions provide a field for insights and changes, which means that we are more likely to avoid gaps in development, draw conclusions and tomorrow we will definitely become better than we were yesterday.

conclusions

1. If you haven't tried holding meetings after projects yet, we recommend holding them. Meet with the team, discuss the project, the experience gained, thank each other for the successes, but also discuss the failures, issues in order to plan changes.
2. It's great if the meeting is conducted by a moderator - a person who was not included in the project and who has the competencies of a coach or facilitator. The moderator structures the conversation, captures important findings and assigns responsibility so that ideas and solutions are not lost.
3. If you are doing retrospectives all the time, consider working systematically with the accumulated findings. Regular deduction can lead to inspiring insights.