Catch Failure Before It Occurs
Retrospectives are key elements of the Agile approach and are described in a classic book by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen: Agile Retrospectives
They are held periodically, typically at the end of an iteration, to inspect and adapt the process and continuously improve it.
In medicine a postmortem examination is conducted to determine the cause of death. Information collected during the procedure can be used to explain what happened. The problem is that the procedure brings no benefit to the deceased person.
Replace 'person' with 'project' and you see that a retrospective at the end of a failed project is similar to a postmortem: helpful for future projects but useless for the failed one.
To avoid a painful postmortem it can be sometimes helpful to try to prevent project failure upfront.
"You’ve seen your own future, which means you can change it if you want to"
- Chief John Anderton, Minority Report A Project Premortem is described in an Harvard Business Review article by Gary Klein:
A Premortem Retrospective is an adaptation of that approach based on the 5 typical phases of Agile Retrospectives.
I have used it a number of times with great success and I am going to describe it in this post.
