Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews: Amazon.ca: Norman L. Kerth, Gerald M. Weinberg: Books

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4.7 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A down-to-earth and highly accessible guide, Nov 17 2003

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (Paperback)

Norman L. Kerth is a professional with twenty years' experience in leading project retrospectives. In Project Retrospectives: A Handbook For Team Reviews, Kerth draws upon his extensive body of experience and expertise to crate an excellent and thoroughly "reader friendly" guidebook showcasing the process of reviewing, and revealing how to learn from the successes and failures of completed business projects. Case studies, preparing for a retrospective, leading a postmortem, and the skills for best learning and sharing knowledge gained from past ventures fill the pages of this down-to-earth and highly accessible guide which is especially recommended to those charged with the responsibility of improving corporate departmental and project team performances.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Understand your project, Nov 2 2003

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Steve Berczuk (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (Paperback)

Project Retrospectives is a must have for anyone who wants(or needs)to understand what happened on their last project. If you plan to conduct a retrospective, the book will show you how with exercises to use with your group. Even if you do not run formal retrospectives, the techniques in this book will help you get a more candid view of how things on your project work.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, Sep 28 2003

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jlion "jlion" (Greensboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (Paperback)

This book is intended as a manual for software developers intending to hold a project retrospective at the end of a large project. A retrospective is a little like a post-mortem. Much is learned during the course of a large project, and a project retrospective is a way to preserve that knowledge for use in later projects.

A retrospective is different than a post-mortem in that a post-mortem sometimes implies that the project was a failure. Kerth makes it clear that as long as knowledge is gained from mistakes made, and that steps are taken to avoid the repetition of those mistakes, then no mistake is a total failure.

Much of what Kerth writes about involves the tools and techniques of a facilitator. A facilitator is something like a psychotherapist for project teams. The facilitator's purpose is to get the members of the team, who sometimes do not work closely together either out of circumstance or preference, to share their opinions and observations about different aspects of the project in a non-threatening way.

A facilitator must be an excellent communicator and should not offer his or her own opinion, only help others to express their own. In Kerth's opinion, much of what makes a project successful involves interpersonal communication and through a project retrospective a facilitator can help a project team improve their communication skills.

I felt that the book offered some excellent suggestions. In particular, I liked Kerth's suggestions for illustrating to management of the value of a project retrospective. He provides an excellent checklist for preparing a proposal to management.

I also liked his suggestions for demonstrating to project teammembers the value of failure. One suggestion is to have everyone watch a movie that involves project management, such as Kerth's favorite, Flight of the Phoenix. Another of Kerth's suggestions is to discuss the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Kerth suggests pointing out how the fact that four of the five books written on the explosion are oriented toward children shows how our culture shuns failure, and then discussing how analyzing the causes of the explosion helped NASA prevent similar accidents in the future.

The book is intended for those intent on performing in-depth project retrospectives or project post-mortems. Much of the book consists of specific tips and techniques for those facilitating retrospectives. If I have a criticism of the book it is that much of the book is at a very practical level and that too little time is spent discussing how to make use of information garnered from project retrospectives in future projects.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent guide to improving organizational performance
"Project Retrospectives" is one of the best written, best edited, most nicely presented, and most useful software books I've ever read. Read more

Published on Feb 8 2003 by Karl E. Wiegers

5.0 out of 5 stars A very practical "how to" book
Project Retrospectives by Norm Kerth places an entirely new light on how to effectively and safely reflect on a recent project and not only learn from successes and mistakes, but... Read more

Published on Nov 14 2001 by Randy Rice