What is a Project Retrospective?

Project retrospectives are a formal method for performing team-based review sessions to maximize what you learn from each project. Norman L. Kerth has collected many powerful techniques for retrospectives to be effective and successful. He published them in his Project Retrospectives Handbook (also available in German and Chinese), a great resource for everybody wanting to learn from the successes and failures of projects.

An good overview on project retrospectives can be gained from Norman L. Kerth's project retrospecitives web site at www.retrospectives.com. Another good introductory text is the article by Ellen Gottesdiener that appeared at The Rational Edge in 2003.

Literature on Project Retrospectives

Norman L. Kerth. Project retrospectives : A handbook for team reviews, Dorset House, New York, 2001.

Collier, Bonnie, DeMarco, Tom and Fearey, Peter. A Defined Process For Project Post Mortem Review. IEEE Software, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 65-72, 1996.

Ellen Gottesdiener. Team Retrospectives — for better iterative assessment. The Rational Edge, April, 2003.

Andreas Birk, Torgeir Dingsøyr, and Tor Stålhane, "Postmortem: Never Leave a Project without It," IEEE Software, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 43-45, May/June 2002.

Retrospectives for Knowledge Management and Improvement

Postmortem analysis (PMA), or "project retrospectives", is a practical method for initiating knowledge management by capturing experience and improvement suggestions from completed projects. It requires little effort and provides first results very fast. This makes PMA suitable even for small and medium-size projects and companies. An article by Andreas Birk, Torgeir Dingsøyr, and Tor Stålhane describes how PMA techniques have been applied for collecting and analyzing experience in software organisations. >>> Article