Continuous improvement is an important topic in expert organisations to stay competitive. It is also one of the principles behind the agile manifesto:

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

It is apparent that continuous improvement is an important topic, but how are we actually ensuring continuous improvement and what tools are there?

One way to ensure constant development in projects is to use retrospectives. Its purpose is to help you review your most recent project/milestone/iteration, in order to understand what happened, what worked well, and what corcetions and changes to make. It is not an activity of finding fault with anyone, but rather an activity for learning from our experiences. It is about improving your practice by reflecting on your recent events. There are different types of retrospectives. In this first blog post about retrospectives, I will present the different types and their characteristics.

Retrospective recurrence

Project retrospective

The project retrospective is held by the end of a project. It gives an outlook over how the project as a whole succeeded. It is important to bring enough information from the whole project lifecycle in order to analyse all phases of the project and not just the last weeks or month(s). The benefit of the project retrospective is that the project can form the big picture and celebrate the success together as well as think of what to do differently in the next project. Here however, comes the drawback with relying only on a project retrospective as well. It does not provide means to do corrective actions during the project execution, which is equally important. The project team might be split after the project and do not work together in the upcoming project(s). One important aspect to keep in mind is to follow-up on the action points when the project has ended (how to arrange time & resources) as well as how to spread the lessons learned from a project retrospective to the organisation.

Milestone/release retrospective

The milestone retrospective is almost like a mini-version of the project retrospective, only that you focus on one project phase at the time. The benefit compared to the project retrospective is that the team has possibilities to address and improve development/working practices during the project execution.

Sprint retrospective

As the name implies, the sprint retrospective originates from Scrum. The team holds the sprint retrospective at the end of each sprint and uses it to discuss what they can changed to make the next sprint more productive. The sprint retrospective addresses the following main topics:

  • What went well during the sprint cycle?
  • What went wrong during the sprint cycle?
  • What could we do differently to improve?

This is probably the first retrospective type that introduced regular retrospective meetings, which the team holds between rather short intervals (less than one month).

Kanban kata

Mike Rother introduced the Toyota Kata/Kanban kata. He studied how Toyota, known for lean manufacturing, apply continuous improvement in their factories. In the Kanban kata, continuous improvement integrates to the daily work. The team has a high-level target to achieve and all work should take the team closer towards this goal. Work is done in short iterations/experiments and continuous PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycles. A less strict method is just to address any blockers/impediments for the on-going tasks during the daily stand-up. This way the team ensures continuous flow on the Kanban board.

There is no right or wrong nor best or worst type of retrospectives. One should pick such retrospectives that fits into the project. A much more important aspect is to start arranging retrospectives in your project. Make retrospectives part of project work. There should always be time to learn and improve in your project. In my second retrospective blog post, I will introduce you to how one can conduct a retrospective in the project, regardless of the retrospective type.