A project retrospective is a structured meeting, in which the team reflects on a completed project to pinpoint what they’ve learned. These meetings can go by many names, including post-mortem evaluations, project reviews, and lessons learned. Far too often, these valuable meetings are only held when mistakes are made on a project. Instead, they should be used as a tool to enhance the current project or to improve future performance. All team members should know that a project is not done until the project retrospective is completed.

Let’s delve further with 7 Ways to Lead Successful Project Retrospectives.

1. Collect Feedback Early and Often

Agencies often rely on team members to remember successes and failures at the end of a project, rather than documenting along the way. I get it — there are so many moving pieces when managing client projects that the last thing you want to do is add another step to the process. However, real-time feedback remains crucial. It ensures that individuals and the collective agency continue to improve with each project. Account managers (you may call them something else) should send a shared document to all team members prior to status update meetings, and ask each person to share 2 successes and 2 areas for improvement. This gives each person time to reflect on what’s going well and what could be improved from their perspective. During meetings, the account manager can focus their energy on prioritizing areas for improvement while also seeking out suggestions. The shared document allows the account manager to identify patterns and potentially course correct during the project.

2. Offer Multiple Ways to Share Information

Project retrospective meetings are great for extroverts who enjoy sharing their thoughts in a group setting. In contrast, the introverts on your team may not be as willing to share what they’ve learned in a group meeting. For these team members, you want to offer multiple ways to share their experiences. Some folks may actively share via the group document more so than during progress check-in meetings. You might also want to have informal discussions throughout the project, as some people are far more comfortable in one-on-one discussions. The folks working on the project have all this information at their disposal; your goal is to create as many opportunities as possible to access that information to improve future work.

3. Remove Fear of Repercussion

Sometimes, people are scared to share that they’ve made a mistake for fear of repercussions. Rather than admitting their mistake, they may attempt to quietly fix it without letting anyone know. There’s a good and a bad to this. The good side is that they’ve shown initiative by trying to fix a problem. The bad side is equally clear: this might be a problem your agency has seen before, and simply coming forward with the mistake could save a lot of wasted time and money. One way for project leaders to mitigate potential fear of repercussion is to communicate the following messages (in your own words) during kickoff meetings: (1) There will be no scapegoats if something does not go according to plan, and (2) Mistakes made on this project will be seen as the cost of innovation and are not a fireable offense.

4. Determine meeting attendees

Sometimes, the account managers overdo it and invite damn near the entire agency to the project retrospective meeting. This is often a result of bloated kickoff meetings; we may assume that all those same people need to be invited to the retrospective meeting. Instead, simply invite the people who worked on the project to the retrospective meeting. Agency management and the rest of the agency will learn from the summary report.

5. Leading the Retrospective Meeting

The “Good, Bad, Better, Best” exercise is helpful in leading a project retrospective meeting. As a best practice, you should be in and out of this meeting in about an hour with less than ten people in attendance.

Here is the basic setup:

a. Use a whiteboard (or virtual whiteboard for hybrid workplaces) to capture feedback from the team.

b. Create labels on the whiteboard with the following categories: Good, Bad, Better, and Best.

c. Explain the categories to all participants, ensuring that everyone is answering the same questions.

Good: What went well?

Bad: What did not go well?

Better: How might we do a better job next time?

Best: Who or what deserves recognition, and what should we continue doing in the future?

d. Give the team about ten minutes of quiet time to write down their thoughts on post-it notes (one observation per post-it-note).

e. Ask participants to take turns placing a post-in note on the wall under the appropriate category and explaining their thoughts.

f. After each person places a post-it-note on the whiteboard, ask the rest of the room: “Would anyone like to add to this thought?”

g. This process continues until all post-it notes are on the wall.

6. Document the Results

The summary report will be about two pages and contain the following information:

• Project description: summary of service(s) delivered, and time needed to deliver each service. Documenting time in the report helps with cost estimation for similar projects in the future. Timekeeping is also useful in understanding the resources needed to deliver your services. As a reminder, time spent delivering a project has nothing to do with the price you charge for that service. If you’re not doing any government or quasi-government work, then you should not be charging by the hour.

• Goals: discuss whether the project delivered on agreed-upon metrics. You also want to determine whether there was a gap between project results and the original scope.

• Good, Bad, Better, Best: highlight project wins and project problems with a description of the root cause for each problem.

• Lessons learned: outline the lessons learned from this project.

7. Share Results from Retrospective Report

Sharing the results from the retrospective report is crucial in your next kickoff meeting. Email the summary report from the project retrospective to all meeting attendees prior to your next kickoff. Prior to starting a new project, all team members will have a baseline understanding of lessons learned and best practices.

Think of the project retrospective as real-time feedback throughout the life of a project. Your goal is to collect feedback early and often to provide an opportunity for team members to think through their individual actions, see other perspectives, and identify ways to improve in the future.

At an individual level, a project retrospective can improve job satisfaction by giving people feedback about their work.

At the agency level, project retrospectives provide a big picture view of how your people, systems, and operations interact to deliver value for your clients. This insight will inform your decisions for future improvement.