If you are curious, courageous, care about yourself and your teammates, and you are interested in personal and professional growth, read this book.
Beginning with his "prime directive", you will learn why and how to conduct project retrospectives. Norm makes a compelling case for the ritual of retrospectives, openly and honestly presenting the opportunities and dangers. There are many engaging features in this book: fables that make a point, a detailed description of an example retrospective, numerous true stories from real retrospectives that grab your interest, cartoons to illustrate the text, and recipes which provide facilitators with the structure, group processes and rationale for conduct successful retrospectives activities.
Who should read this wonderful book? The book's voice addresses the retrospective facilitator ("must" readers) along with anyone else who wants to learn about retrospectives. This audience includes project managers and their managers, along with team members.
Why these readers? Because software project success is all about people, not technology. How we interrelate, use technology, communicate, and are affected by project history impacts our work. And if we don't learn from our successes and mistakes, we can't grow, do better and have our work bring value to our organizations and ourselves. Project retrospectives are an essential tool toward that end. Norm Kerth's book helps us use this wonderful tool.
The first part of the book explains the need for ritual, how to tailor a retrospective to various situations, how to make a business case for having a retrospective, and how prepare for it. The case study Norm presents in the second chapter (Anatomy of a Retrospective) provides a holistic picture of the things to follow. The third and fourth chapters tell you how to tailor retrospectives to particular projects (Engineering a Retrospective: Making Choices) and how to talk groups who are interested in improving their processes into having a retrospective (Selling a Retrospective). These are important topics which determine if the people will be given the opportunity to learn from their own experience, and how to focus on the things that will make the retrospective effective. Chapter 5 (Preparing for a Retrospective) covers the groundwork required to have the facts and information for the retrospective, from initiating contact with the managers to arriving at the site. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses a wide array of exercises for the retrospective. Norm presents each exercise in a way that makes it easy to decide whether it is appropriate for a particular project. The pattern includes (among others): Purpose, When to use, Duration, Procedure, Background and theory, and References for further reading.
The second part of the book discusses postmortems, a special case of retrospectives. Postmortems correspond to failed projects. In Chapter 7 (Leading a Postmortem) Norm explains the differences between postmortems and retrospectives, and how to transform the failed-project experience into a learning opportunity. Chapter 8 (Postmortem Exercises) provides exercises designed to handle various circumstances typical of failed projects. In Chapter 9 (On Becoming a Skilled Retrospective Facilitator) Norm shares six lessons learned "through the school of hard knocks," and discusses several procedures that good facilitators should keep in their back pocket. Finally, Chapter 10 (After the Retrospective) explains what to do with the information that surfaces during the retrospective.
Norm has sprinkled the entire book with True Stories. They complement nicely the material and provide additional insight into how retrospectives work and what you should expect. I've also enjoyed the annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter; without Norm's summary the chances of my reading Sharon Loeschen's "The Magic of Satir" were slim. Finally, the book's illustrations are funny and to the point.
I've used Norm Kerth's Project Retrospectives in my Software Project Management class. My students have learned important lessons from it. I trust that once they become managers, they will keep the learning process going through wrapping up their projects with retrospectives.