Project Retrospectives to Retain Valuable Project Experience

The Guns of August is a military history book describing the events of the first month of World War I. The focus of the book is to provide the history of World War I from the declaration of war through the start of the French offensive that stopped the German advance through France resulting in a stalemate for the subsequent four years. In addition, the book provides history on the plans, strategies, world events and international sentiments prior to and during the war.

Agile Project Management with Scrum describes the process of managing a Scrum software development project. It uses a mixture of definitions and case studies to educate a would-be Scrum manager (aka ScrumMaster^TM) on Scrum, the major players in a Scrum project and the ScrumMaster's role. Both success and failure case studies are provided.

In a recent blog on stupid decisions, a reader asked about lessons learned processes. I had to defer the question since my reply would have been as long as the blog he was commenting on. So here we go: the entire class of retrospectives, postmortems, and lessons learned are a waste of time. Well, to be fair, I have never seen them work. They may have worked for others. Maybe the reason I never see them work is that I am involved only on disasters, you know, those projects everyone talks about for years to come, the ones people cannot get way from fast enough. Surely, the type of work I perform taints my experience.