Retrospectives & Post Mortems

Information on retrospectives and post mortems.

There is a very important distinction between a retro and a post mortem.

A retrospective is an activity that should happen at the end of every pre-defined sprint during the course of the project. This isn’t just exclusive to agile projects, but can take place during all projects whenever a predefined sprint is over. That can be once a major milestone is complete, or something is delivered. The point of the retro is to check in and course correct during the process.

A post-mortem is an activity that should happen once a project is completely finished. The point of the post-mortem is to recap and learn from the project as a whole. What went right, what went wrong, etc, and then bring those learning into future projects by changing how all business is done agency-wide and refine things to be better.

Generally, a retro is for the project itself and tweaking things in real time, and the post-mortem should be an opportunity to actually apply learnings to the overall culture and refine across all disciplines.

For projects that are constantly ongoing like retainer-based project and have no truly defined beginning or end, you can employ both activities where you’re defining “sprints” within the retainer, and then milestones where you’re defining work as finished and handed off, so you can learn from how things have transpired and grow as a team.

Here’s a link to the blog with the retro templates that I like, and I’ve attached the PPT that has a few different styles of post-mortem templates:

5 fun sprint retrospective ideas with templates - Work Life by AtlassianWork Life by Atlassian

One useful tool for retros is: funretro.io -- it allows remote team members to participate and provides a digital board to reference once the retro is over. It allows you to customize the columns depending on the template that you use, anonymous card creations, voting and commenting.