Follow These 5 Important Retrospectives Rules

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Lessons Learned  

As someone who started my career in traditional project management, I have always been frustrated by the lessons learned process. It was (and is) almost universally hated, and team members often don’t engage, only want to point fingers, or have the attitude that it’s a waste of time because nothing will change. Too often, those perspectives are accurate.

Yet, in agile, the retrospective process generally works well. There are exceptions of course, but I have come across very few organizations or individual teams where there was anywhere close to the negativity that I see with lessons learned.

Retrospectives vs. lessons learned
There are two primary reasons for that, both of which can be applied to traditional project delivery approaches to make lessons learned more meaningful:

1. The team owns the ability to make changes. With the team, ScrumMaster, product owner and stakeholders engaged, if there is agreement on a need to make adjustments, then the shift can happen immediately. That has never been the case in traditional projects, where recommendations get sent to a PMO or similar body and are frequently ignored. However, now that all teams (regardless of how they work) are gaining greater autonomy over their work, there is the opportunity for those teams to incorporate their recommendations directly—making the process more meaningful.
2. …

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