Aligning large projects
An advantage that a project retrospective has over a sprint retrospective is that it brings together multiple teams in the case of a large project. This allows for cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences. The project retrospective is not limited to a meeting at project close-out either; with very large projects, it might be advisable to have more than one project retrospective, say halfway during the project. In the scrum framework, large projects are governed via a “Scrum of Scrums”. While meetings are held to align the various teams, a Retrospective will benefit from the collective wisdom of all the teams.
Learning from Failure
It is a sad fact of life that not every project succeeds; some are cancelled and some fail. While Agile is structured in such a way that a floundering project can “fail fast”, this is not the time to walk away. Rather, this is the time to learn from mistakes made along the way and ensure that they will not happen in the future. There are a number of reasons why a project may fail, and it is not always because the development team did not deliver.
In fact, the problems often arise in the design phase. A poor or inadequate blueprint of what the Minimum Viable Product should be will never result in a successful product, no matter how hard the team tries or how many changes are applied. Using the Project Retrospective to unearth why a project failed is the first step towards ensuring failure does not re-occur.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: