SPA 2006 – Retrospectives

This session was run by Norman Kerth as a retrospective on his book, “Project Retrospectives”, five years on.

Kerth’s prime directive:

“Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available and the situation at hand.”

This prime directive leads us to a phased approach to retrospectives.

1. Readying; here we create a feeling of safety. All participants must understand that this is not a witch hunt. We are all trying to improve the future, not blame for the past.
2. Reviewing; Kerth suggests approaches such as constructing time lines and relating emotions to project phases. In this way we can step back and see the context in which we were working.
3. Planning; this is about trying to affect the future. Approaches include “changing the wallpaper” to making suggestions to management.

The retrospective on retrospectives consisted primarily of lessons learnt, a few are listed below.

• Many organisations do not want to change
• Given some level of success, who will thank us for trying to go further?
• It is far to easy to feel like the retrospective is over after the meeting (nothing changes).
• Many people want to learn but breaking of habits is hard.
• Retrospectives that pull individuals from across functions can improve understanding.
• Retrospectives can be used in a variety of ways; project kick off, heartbeat, iteration, milestone.
• An outside facilitator can put people at ease and help avoid blame.

Finally Kerth suggested a couple of success stories. At Siemens the Austrian CEO successfully applied retrospectives to import “the Siemens way” into newly acquired companies. At Intel a senior manages studying the effects of retrospectives on productivity found that a 4 hour retrospective resulted in a 4 month productivity boost.