How to lead an insightful project retrospective session?
Three, two, go!
As a team leaders or product designers we have to look constantly for ways to improve and iterate an environment we work within. A project retrospective session is a structured activity that aims to transperate and report on a project’s success, failures and zonea of stagnation to achive the best result with futher chlanges.The core should be established
– Project name
– Project status: Active, Closed, Data Transferring, Suspended, etc.
– Project type: internal, external
– Stakeholders info: country, specials
– Business domain
– Project team info
– Project duration
– Project value
Project overview
– Brief project onboarding
– High-level project architecture
Your project role: designer, researcher, analyst, interviewer, etc
– Design activities and responsibilities
– Screens/prototypes/QA or Prod environment demonstration
– Describe your typical workday
– Role in the development process: UML diagram, if possible
– Project-related relations with other teammates and teams
– Describe the quality control process
Project insights
– What challenges have you faced?
– What was easy to do?
– What was hard to do?
– What did you learn?
– What was learned by people with whom you had communicated?
Project issues
– What was working well?
– What wasn’t working well?
– What could be improved?
– Did you have internal conflicts, misunderstands, or disagreements? If so, how do you solve them?
– Did you have external conflicts, misunderstands, or disagreements? If so, how do you solve them?
– What compromises were made?
– What was painful but necessary?
Conclusion
– Are you proud of our finished work: Yes – why? No – Why?
– Did you get the results you wanted
– What impact did your activities bring to the project?
– What did you learn about working on the project?
– What would you change if you were back at the start of the project?
Each retrospective is an organized activity that must be documented. The retrospective is a checkpoint of the project's state at the time of the session. Retrospectives are compared against each other to identify trends in project changes.