PMO Facilitating the Agile Retrospective

We recently launched a new half-day course – The PMO’s Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives – first course coming up at the beginning of July.

The course is designed for those PMO practitioners who are working more and more with Agile teams in project delivery and the retrospective part of the process is a perfect place for the PMO to get involved and help support the team.

Retrospectives are all about monitoring progress, optimising the performance of the team and ultimately about removing blockers and solving problems.

There are a number of different ways to tackle the retrospective – and it plays very well to PMO practitioners who are already facilitating workshops. Just like facilitation, there is a whole raft of preparation needed to ensure the sessions run well and everyone is engaged and contributing. Right now that also means preparation for virtual retrospectives too.

There’s a lot of different activities which are utilised depending on what kind of output you’re looking for from the retrospective. There are also specific approaches to address particular types of challenges that the team might be facing in parts of the project.

And finally, there are of course outcomes that often need action from the team or from others in the organisation.

The PMO role is perfectly placed to support the whole retrospective process from beginning to end – and it’s a role that sits alongside the Project Manager or Scrum Master, offering support to make it happen.

The other great thing about learning more about retrospectives is that you can use the approaches and the different techniques in other types of project meetings and workshops too. It’s like having a bag of tools – different approaches you can introduce depending on what the meeting is about or the problem being solved – consider agile retrospective skills as boosting your overall facilitation and workshopping skills.

Why not check out the half-day course – The PMO’s Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives – and start learning those crucial skills and practical approaches that could really boost your facilitation skills, start building that bag of tools.