Are You Reporting on Your Retrospectives Properly?

This is a part of a series that was cre­at­ed to help you get the prac­tice of ret­ro­spec­tives built into your com­pany.  This series will walk through the approach, nec­es­sary roles, in addi­tion to guides for each role to help your com­pany get started quickly.

Retrospectives/after action reviews (AARs) enable the team to reflect upon the process and offer ideas on ways to improve the process the next time around.

Here is an example report that captures the ideas provided by a hypothetical project team. Notice how specific the actionable recommendations are.

Name of Meeting	After Action Review, ABC Email Tool Improvement
Date Held	April 1, 2010
Background/Scope	Over the last three months, our team worked to improve functionality of the ABC Tool. This ARR sought to capture some of the key lessons learned. Team members were asked to identify three specific, actionable improvements.
AAR Facilitator	Name
Team Members/AAR Participants	Names
Keywords	Customer survey, redesign, email, training
Key Dates/Learning Acquired	January – April 2010

Input During Meeting	Specific Actionable Recommendations
“We need to involve a larger variety of users in the redesign process.”	Work with six customers representing each of the three segments.
“We need to get clearer on user goals.”	Forget about our assumptions and survey users on their actual wants and needs.
“Our users are going to need more training on this.”	Put in a request to double the budget for training both in terms of time and money.