Project Post-Mortems
End-of-project, weeks-to-months of context, half a day not thirty minutes. A different ceremony with a different tempo from your sprint retro.
Why this matters
If the project ran six months, the retrospective is half a day. Thirty minutes for thirty weeks of work is a discount you can't afford. Most pages run the same templates for a sprint and a project; the failure mode is treating a multi-month arc as a long sprint. The arc is plottable, the structural friction is nameable, and the ending deserves a closer that acknowledges it. Skip the templated sprint format — it doesn't have the time to do the work.
Recommended activities
4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For)
A reflective four-column retro for end-of-project lessons.
Sailboat
A four-quadrant retro for naming structural friction without pointing at a person.
The Prime Directive
Norman Kerth's frame for a blameless retro. Read it the first time. Skip it the tenth.
Dot Voting
Three dots, vote silently, the senior person votes last. Anything else is a popularity contest with a sticker budget.
Timeline Retrospective
End-of-quarter, end-of-project. The mood line is the format. Don't run it on a sprint.
Appreciations (Kudos)
Specific or skip. 'Thanks for being awesome' is worse than silence.
How to run it
Open with the Prime Directive, especially if the project ended badly — blamelessness has to be re-established at this scale. Reconstruct the arc with a Timeline Retrospective; multi-week projects have plottable events and a mood line, and the timeline is the format that surfaces them. Run 4Ls as the reflective backbone — Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed-for sorts the lessons-learned cleanly across the full project. If something structural slowed the team — coupling, dependencies, scope drift — bring in Sailboat as the what-slowed-us-down lens. Close with Dot Voting on the lessons, then Appreciations as the ceremonial closer; the project is ending and people deserve to hear it.