Pols Consulting

Norm Kerth gave a great talk on retrospectives at SPA2006.

I’ve been a fan of retrospectives for a long time. The interesting thing for me was Norm’s description of Kick-Off Retrospectives.

I typically do this when teams are formed for a specific project (and don’t stay together once it has been completed). They basically run a retrospective to set the scene for how the team wants to operate.

The subtlety I had missed is that you can use the future perfect tense when asking the questions. You can ask people to imagine that this is the retrospective at the end of the project and ask them “What was so good about this project that you would like to repeat on future projects?” This sets the scene for how the team want to operate.

While on the subject of retrospectives, here is an interesting article by Ester Derby on keeping retrospectives fresh