Are You Reporting on Your Retrospectives Properly?
November 29, 2010
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. |