What’s the Point of the Agile Project Retrospective?

The concept of a Retrospective should be familiar to anyone working on an Agile project. In fact, the concept should be familiar to anyone who has ever worked on any sort of project. There have been several names over the years that describe this activity of reviewing what happened during a project, such as “post-mortem” or “lessons learnt”.

While some people may argue that these are not the same thing for a variety of reasons, the inputs, discussions and actions arising out of such meetings are fundamentally the same.

There are different adjectives one can hang in front of the word “retrospective”, such as “Sprint”, “Release” or “Project”.  This defines the scope of what is to be reviewed. Any Sprint team member will have participated in a Sprint retrospective, and knows its value.

However, when it comes to the end of a project, the holding of a Project retrospective is sometimes perfunctory or omitted altogether. This often happens because the team is being disbanded, now that the project has completed. This is a serious oversight of a very valuable tool for process improvement, not just for future projects, but for the company as a whole.

Recommended Further Reading

The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: