Generating good insight

At the end of a project teams go through something called a retrospective. A quick Google search of what does Retrospective mean in terms of project management, I found a definition. Inloox defines retrospective as, “A retrospective is an agile method, most often associated with the scrum methodology (‘sprint retrospective’). It describes the regular meeting of the project team. During such a meeting, the team looks back at their achievements and reflects on how to improve future projects.”

Now that you have an understanding of what a retrospective, we can get into how to get the ball rolling. At the start of the retrospective you and your team reflects and tries to generate good insight about the achievements failures and how to improve on future projects. In a perfect world, when doing a retrospective in your team, you want everyone to participate so you improve as a unit, but this isn’t a perfect world and everyone is different.

This poses a problem, what happens when your group has some people with strong personalities, extroverts and the other people on the team are introverts and aren’t as strong being open with their ideas? You get those strong personality people taking over the retrospective. Doug Rose from lynda says “One thing you might find with retrospectives is that a few strong personalities will do most of the talking.”, which doesn’t get the whole team involved and that could potentially stunt the growth of the next project.

How to get everyone involved now? Doug from Lynda’s idea was a game, which he says some companies don’t do because it doesn’t seem “professional”, but it can be really helpful. The game is the called the “Question Circle”, which basically everyone has to get involved and give their input. This is a great way to generate good insight from EVERYONE on the team and can help improve the next project especially if the whole team is involved.
 * Get everyone involved!! Make an environment comfortable enough so everyone can present and give everyone in the team a chance to get what they want to say out.HEAD-10-things-to-consider-when-choosing-project-management-software.png