Each year the House of PMO wants to capture how PMO practitioners have got on during the year and also capture what they're thinking about as we kick off a new year.
The session we hosted at the beginning of 2022 not only brought PMO practitioners together to reflect and chat about their year - sharing their highs and lows. We also used the session to show a few different retrospective exercises that could be picked up and used in your own team retrospectives back in the office.
The session was not recorded - instead, we have the outputs for you to take a look through.
Throughout the session, we used Zoom and Miro. Miro allowed us to use a virtual whiteboard - it was intuitive and people were quick to pick up on how to use it.
In this article, we share the session from start to end.
Can you remember when 2020 was way off in the future – at 10 years old I was convinced we would be wearing lots of silver and the ZX Spectrum would be a distant memory!
So here we are, nearly 2020, but before that, we wanted to bring a final webinar to you before we get there.
In this session, we’ll be taking a look at 2019. It’s like all the magazines and supplements do at this time of year – a retrospective news review, take a whistlestop tour of what happened and what we learnt.
Retrospectives. We’re hearing a lot about this part of Agile based project and product development.
It’s one of the main events or ceremonies in SCRUM – or perhaps you might just think of it as another name for a lesson learnt?
In this session, John McIntyre and the team at Ticketmaster showed us the ropes and helped us to find out about:
What is a retrospective and does the PMO get involved in them?
How are they planned and facilitated? If at all?
What happens with the information or outputs from a retrospective?
Is there anything the PMO can be doing to help /support retrospectives?
And what are the top tips for the PMO to take away and use in their business and with their teams tomorrow?
Here we share the video from the session and the presentation
My recent survey asked how transferable Lessons Learned are between projects.
The follow-up (you can see that once you've taken part in the survey) imparted my thoughts and summarised some of the responses I received. Some of the comments didn't quite fit into the survey format, including those from PMO Leader and fellow Flashmobber John McIntyre of Ticketmaster, who said:
I've always found Lessons Learned to be something that is good in theory, but that seldom has any practical application. Attempting to condense the learnings of a project down to a few lines in a lessons log, or (dare I say it) database only serves to sanitise the lesson to the extent that the learning is inevitably lost.
And why for the love of all things holy do we only do lessons reviews at the end of projects? Agile has it right here by advocating regular retrospectives where lessons are picked up and resolved continuously. I agree that the lesson could become dry and distant, and the real-life consequences of "getting it wrong" diluted. So what would be better? Back to John: