Many organizations are looking for better ways to improve their current program and project management practices year over year. At Intel, we have historically utilized post-mortems or post-project audits as the established means for capturing our key learnings. However, these methods have gained a negative connotation within the company, and are sometimes viewed as a necessary evil that must be completed before closing out one program or project and moving on to the next. Today, we are rapidly moving away from the post-project audit and post-mortem methods of collecting our key learnings, and are moving to a more effective method known as retrospectives.
The intent of this paper is to establish the foundation for the retrospective methodology and why we are utilizing it at Intel. We explain what the retrospective methodology is, how is it different from post-mortems and post-project audits, and the benefits we’ve realized through the implementation of utilizing this method for improving our program and project management practices at Intel.
What is a retrospective?
Sometimes the best way to describe a new concept is to describe what it is NOT. A retrospective is not a one-time event that happens at the end of a program or project. It is not a bulleted list of statements that the team creates and never looks at again, and it is not an exercise to point fingers or to place blame. Rather, it is a “ritual” where the team members who have a perspective to share meet at strategic points during the program or project lifecycle to discuss what is working and what needs to be improved. The intent is to capture key lessons while a program or project is in-flight, and apply improvements during the remainder of the lifecycle. The focus is on learning, not on finger-pointing or blaming.
So how is the retrospective method different from post-mortems and post-project audits? In many companies, a post-mortem is a post project audit meeting held following the conclusion or cancellation of a project that is typically led by the program or project manager. Unfortunately, this meeting occurs at the end of the lifecycle, therefore too late to implement corrections on the program or project that is in-flight. At best, learnings can be applied to the next program or project. In our experience, the post-mortem is many times held as an after thought without a defined, objective process and does not lead to actionable change to program or project team practices. Often team members don’t want to attend due to bad experiences in the past where the process became personal and non-productive. Alternatively, they have shared their perspective and provided detailed recommendations, and never saw any measurable change.
When applied most effectively, a trained, objective facilitator guides the team through an analysis of what is working well and what isn’t, and then helps the program or project team generate ideas for improvement and what they want to do differently. To apply the learnings, the facilitator then works with the team to create actionable plans to improve both effectiveness and efficiency. Learnings are applied and behaviors are changed through the continuous monitoring and tracking of action plan implementation and communication of progress to senior stakeholders within the organization.
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