Program Retrospective
What is Program Retrospective
Retrospective Benefits
Program Retrospective Scope
Timing for the retrospectives
Existing Process Gaps
Retrospective Steps
Best Practices
Things to Avoid
Suggestion for adoption
Methodologies
Examples
What is Program Retrospective
A retrospective meeting, or retro, is a structured session that gives teams time to reflect on a completed project,
major intermediary milestone, sprint or any other key milestone. It allows a team and individuals to highlight both
the successes and failures of a project, identify areas that need improvement, and reflect on the project as a whole.
Retrospective Benefits
Retros help the team as a whole gather their thoughts and opinions on a recent project. Often, we move from
project to project or task to task without taking the time to sit and reflect. An effective retrospective can thus be an
incredibly beneficial way to help improve ways of working, especially when it comes to teams.
Few of the benefits of holding a project retrospective:
Build a transparent and safe team environment
Boost team spirit
Help team learn and develop
Highlight strengths and weaknesses
Identify blockers in ways of working
Set better and more realistic expectations
Improve planning and structure for future projects
Program Retrospective Scope
Scope of the retrospective includes successes, failures and areas of improvements in the project. It could also
include effectiveness of the team's communications, collaboration, tools and the overall processes.
Timing for the retrospectives
Timing for the retrospectives varies based on the complexity of the programs, development methodology (waterfall,
Scrum, SAFe, etc), key program milestone completion, etc.
For the programs that follow Agile methodologies, teams usually conduct a retro after every sprint or
completion of an ART (Agile Release Train) or after shipping a major feature.
For Waterfall, retrospectives are either conducted at the completion of a major milestone or program phase
or after the program completion.
Encourage teams to have a Midterm Retro for programs where it makes sense.
Existing Process Gaps
No standard way of conducting and capturing notes from the retrospectives
Key take aways from the retrospective are not being revisited or implemented in future programs
Majority of the retros are conducted only during the program closure
Retrospective Steps
Best Practices
Always have a clear time-boxed agenda
Set boundaries (scope) for the discussion
Encourage full team participation
Celebrate wins / successes
Organize feedback into themes
Share the feedback and meeting minutes and top take aways with the team after the meeting
Conduct retrospectives after every critical milestone (or after a sprint in Agile teams)
Things to Avoid
Lack of clear purpose, agenda and structure
Blaming and discussions about people rather than processes
Lack of clear insights and take aways
Not encouraging everyone to speak / participate
Focusing only on what went wrong and improvement areas
Ineffective time management
Not following up on the action items/ key take aways
Suggestion for adoption
To keep the process/ tool standard across all the teams and programs, we are suggesting simple but effective Went
Well - Didn't go well - Action Items method. Workfront can be leveraged to create and capture the retrospective
outcomes. Sample view from the Workfront shown below (pending to be rolled out in production).
Methodologies
While there are multiple methods to conduct a retro, a few popular ones are listed below with further details:
Mad, Sad, Glad
Four L's - liked, learned, lacked, and longed
Starfish method
Sailboat method
KALM - Keep, Add, More, Less
Start, Stop, Continue
Six Thinking Hats
Examples
Billing Experience
7 Hats Approach Overview
Lessons Learnt Document (collected from team before meeting)
Lessons Learned Summary (captured after meeting)
