Most people believe that to learn how to do things better, we have to look at how we do them now. That's the fundamental idea of project retrospectives. But there are three problems. First, we don't always conduct retrospectives. Second, when we do, we don't always do a good job. Finally, we don't consistently use what we discover when we do conduct retrospectives. We can reach a better understanding of the causes of these three problems by examining this question: who pays for retrospectives?
Typically, projects pay for their own retrospectives — or more specifically, the sponsors do. But the interest of sponsors in retrospectives is often lukewarm at best. Many sponsors feel that retrospectives add little to the deliverables they're paying for, and which have already been delivered. They do add to future deliverables of other projects, and sponsors might benefit from that someday — or they might not.
The organization as a whole is the real beneficiary of retrospectives, especially when the issues uncovered are systemic. But typically, organizations don't consciously fund retrospectives — the Chart of Accounts has no line item for them. Since organizations don't pay for retrospectives explicitly, they don't value them. I call this the Retrospective Funding Problem.
But the Retrospective Funding Problem has a deeper cause. The drive for conducting retrospectives usually comes from project teams. Since the organization isn't the driver of retrospectives, the organization is at best ambivalent about them: "You can hold a retrospective, if you want, but we won't pay extra for it. And no travel."
For virtual teams, the problem is even worse. When all elements of the virtual team are under the same financial ownership, there is at least some chance that we can apply to virtual teams any solution to the Retrospective Funding Problem for co-located teams. But even for virtual teams under one owner, divisions and other organizational structures insert a separation of financial accountability that creates obstacles for financial support.
For virtual The organization as a whole is the
real beneficiary of retrospectives,
especially when the issues
uncovered are systemicteams of mixed financial ownership, we have an additional problem: confidentiality. What can actually be disclosed in the retrospective? If an issue arises from the processes of one participating enterprise partner, can team members who hail from that partner talk about it? This tangle reduces the ability to learn, limiting performance in future partnerships between the participating enterprises.
Addressing these problems is difficult, because the retrospective expenditure happens now, and the benefit arrives in future years — three to five years from now. Because the benefit delay coincides with the tenure of most managers, the benefits of retrospectives don't arrive during the tenures of the decision makers who support them.
Until the enterprise pays for retrospectives and truly understands their value, we'll probably just muddle along. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
- Project Improvisation and Risk Management
- When reality trips up our project plans, we improvise or we replan. When we do, we create new risks
and render our old risk plans obsolete. Here are some suggestions for managing risks when we improvise.
- Managing Non-Content Risks: I
- When project teams and their sponsors manage risk, they usually focus on those risks most closely associated
with the tasks — content risks. Meanwhile, other risks — non-content risks — get less
attention. Among these are risks related to the processes and politics by which the organization gets
things done.
- The Planning Fallacy and Self-Interest
- A well-known cognitive bias, the planning fallacy, accounts for many unrealistic estimates of project
cost and schedule. Overruns are common. But another cognitive bias, and organizational politics, combine
with the planning fallacy to make a bad situation even worse.
- Seven More Planning Pitfalls: II
- Planning teams, like all teams, are susceptible to several patterns of interaction that can lead to
counter-productive results. Three of these most relevant to planners are False Consensus, Groupthink,
and Shared Information Bias.
- Some Perils of Reverse Scheduling
- Especially when time is tight, project sponsors sometimes ask their project managers to produce "reverse
schedules." They want to know what would have to be done by when to complete their projects "on
time." It's a risky process that produces aggressive schedules.
See also Project Management and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on April 10: Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
- A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging. Available here and by RSS on April 10.
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