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In traditional project management, it is typically recommended that you conduct a project handover (and/or ceremony) and close the project. This is typically done with a project closure document. And though much of the emphasis is on planning your project thoroughly, mitigating the risk and issues and executing the project to its successful outcome, the closing aspect of the project is not mentioned enough in the industry, nor is it done well or at all.
For Agile/Scrum, it is even more important in my opinion, to conduct an assessment of your iterations/Sprints at the close of each one. In the Agile community this is often referred to as the "retrospective". This is a meeting where a team looks back on a past period of work so that they can learn from their experience and apply this learning to future projects. This should be conducted at the end of each iteration/Sprint and will involve the team, management and the Product Owner and facilitated by the ScrumMaster.
An important ingredient to these retrospectives is the ability to reflect deeply about the deliverable or product. Did the product meet the backlog of requirements from the Product Owner? What did the team actually accomplish? What impediment did they face and was the ScrumMaster able to remove them? What worked well and what did not work well in each iteration/Sprint?
What you don't want is Retrospectives to regress down to finger pointing, blame games and bitch fests. This is the duty of the ScrumMaster or Agile PM to ensure that retrospectives get conducted smoothly, fairly and productively. These also need to be documented and archived for a lessons learned for future projects.
Posted on: September 20, 2011 02:14 PM |
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