ABSTRACT
The fact that the majority of IT projects fail on at least one measure of success, and that billions of dollars in project waste is reported each year, suggests that there is a critical need for improving the way we manage these projects. The sobering truth is that the secret to more successful project management has been right in front of us the whole time - learning from the past. A retrospective is a formal method for evaluating project performance, extracting lessons learned, and making recommendations for the future. A comprehensive retrospective considers three process-based measures of project success: whether it came in on schedule, whether it came in on budget, and whether the requirements were met. Retrospectives offer a variety of potential benefits, including the following: Organizational learning, Continuous improvement, better estimating and scheduling, Team building, improved recognition and reflection. In the IT industry, retrospectives go by many names. One popular term is postmortem, from Latin for 'after death'.
