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.
Kerth's Four Key Questions (The Original 4)
Every column retro descends from these four questions. The paraphrases kept the columns and lost the point.
Circles and Soup (Circle of Influence)
A three-ring sort for the team drowning in complaints about things it can't control.
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.