Analysis of past projects

Lessons Learned Lessons or Post Programs or Post Project Analysis is one of the most powerful tools to proactively improve the quality of your work. A retrospective is a separately allocated period of time, with the goal of turning one’s view of the work done, studying the experience gained and asking yourself the following questions: “ What was good and how to do it in the future? ” And “ What was wrong and how to avoid it ? "

Despite the fact that retrospectives are classified as Best Practices , they are rarely used. The two main reasons for this are: “It’s hard to gather all those *** in a retrospective workshop” and “We did it once, but it didn’t do any good.”

The first reason arises from the fact that workshops on retrospective occur at the end of project development. Most of the team members are already working on other projects, and those who remain are busy releasing the project or supporting it. Flexible methods solve this problem very simply: you should not do only one retrospective at the end of the project, it is necessary to do retrospectives throughout its length . Benefits:

• Project members are always available because they are still assigned to the project.
• A monthly seminar on the results of, for example, one phase of the project is much easier to plan and it will take only about an hour (instead of a whole day).
• All the experience gained and developments are still fresh in memory, and it is unlikely that something will be missed.
• And most importantly, the lessons learned can be applied to the rest of the project.

The second reason for the unpopularity of retrospectives is that it is often possible to collect a lot of interesting and useful information, but there is no way to use the data in practice in future projects.