Ian Burgess

Over the last few months I have been dealing with issues on how to motivate staff and found this really interesting talk from TED by Dan Pink (who happens to be Al Gore’s speech writer). He touches on practices such as Result only Work Environments definitely food for thought.

Starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think

The importance of the retrospective cannot be underestimated it in many cases is the worst performed element of the agile practices. I am currently researching different project managers and facilitators retrospective practices.

I am currently documenting my thoughts on this but I during my research I found this video from Google Tec Talks.

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The one phase that is most often neglected in agile development is the retrospective, fulfilling the same role as lessons learned in other methodologies such as Prince2. Only paying lip service to the retrospective will have noticeable effect on the delivery of the project it is in this phase that misunderstandings are outlined and process that have not went well are addressed.

Some Project Managers focus on this in a very structured way moving from one defined stage to the next, I have over time come to believe that a structure is important to focus the meeting but a strict agenda has never really achieved the best results.  What I want to outline are general principles that should be included in any retrospective, remembering that each section will naturally flow together and it is the PM job to bring them back to the necessary stage and maintain relevance and focus.

Lets look at what a retrospective should include:

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