I believe that there is
always room for improvement within teams. Improvements can be small, large,
incremental or even mind-blowing. In all cases the best way to improve what you
do is to hold a retrospective. A retrospective is a meeting with the following
agenda:
- What did we do well?
- What did we do not-so-well?
- What could we do better next time?
- Is there something that we can do better right now?
When I run a retrospective
I try not to focus on an individual project, but on the overall productivity of
the team. In some cases it makes sense to retrospect a project, but if you do,
here are some guidelines:
Failed Project
Retrospective - I try not to
focus on a failed project. This goes counter to most retrospectives or
"review" of failed projects. When you do this after a failed project
the team tends to feel like they are being beat up for their failure. By the
time you get to your retrospective your biggest issues should have already been
addressed and it isn't productive to continue flogging the team. So, keep it
short, make sure that the big problem won't be repeated in the future. Above
all, make sure that the team knows the goal is to improve overall and learn from
mistakes.
Successful Project
Retrospective - Many feel that
there is no reason to talk about a successful project because it was in fact
successful. This is where the "not-so-well" can come out. This is
typically where the team will identify something that is really a risk to
future successes. For example, we found out that someone had saved us from a
critical problem "again" and that we were relying on this one person
to fix a lot of problems on the fly. We were able to identify a bottleneck that
could have caused a really big problem.
Overall Retrospective - I try to do these a couple of times a
year. In general the team enjoys these. This is where there is a lot of patting
on the back, real thought on what can be done and building morale. Focus on improving strengths and
minimizing weaknesses.
It is important to try
to come out of the retrospective with one thing that you can
do right now to improve. For example, we had one week in our project
timeline that was essentially just scheduling a task. We found that it was
always one of two people who were assigned this task. The team decided that these
individuals would reserve time in their schedule to do the task. Then we could
always count on them to be available rather than trying to coordinate. We cut a
week off of the timeline! The side effect was that we all had non-meeting time
blocked in our calendars to get real work done!
Take time to look back
at what you do. You'll be surprised at what can happen.
Helpful Links:
It's difficult to take time from the everyday grind to look back. However, planning a retrospective is well worth the effort. Because as you mentioned, whether the project is successful or not, there is always room for improvement.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I wish that Google had a link to share blogs on LinkedIn.
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