CAST 2013

Using retrospectives and extracting lessons learned are common tools teams use to evaluate a work effort and come up with ideas about what to do again, what to avoid, and what to do differently. This can be a fabulous opportunity to explore processes, team dynamics, organizational influences, external factors, personnel issues, management strategies, guidelines and procedures, tool support, skills, and anything else that contributed to the team’s success or failure in achieving their goals. But far too often, lessons learned exercises are forfeited due to lack of time, priority, or interest. Even more tragic is when the time is spent improperly – playing the blame game, venting sessions with no action, gathering data for performance appraisals, etc. – retrospectives can become demoralizing, cause people to participate poorly or even avoid the exercise altogether.

Overall, turning the critical eye toward our own work, analyzing our own failures and shortcomings, can be a difficult task. So I suggest we do it more! Especially if retrospectives and lessons learned sessions are not done or done poorly on your projects. Let’s perform personal retrospectives! We can file bugs and perform assessments on ourselves. What we discover can inspire change and personal evolution (and sometimes revolution!) leading to things like establishing favored protocols, reducing unproductive habits, seeing and avoiding traps, finding skill and knowledge gaps, identifying the need for mentorship or opportunities to mentor others, or whatever else you need to become the best master craftsman you can be.

In this session, Dawn will illustrate how she has used introspective retrospectives throughout her career to learn from her experiences – not only to improve personally, but to generate lessons learned to share in coaching and mentoring sessions, conferences presentations, consulting engagements, and training courses. What will you learn, or re-learn?