Project Retrospectives

Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (Dorset House Publishing, 2001)

Written by Norman L. Kerth, this book established the foundational practices for conducting post-project retrospectives. It introduced the Prime Directive: “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” The book provides rituals and facilitation techniques for creating safe, blame-free environments where teams can reflect honestly on their work. It predates the agile retrospective movement and influenced how iterative teams later adapted project-level reflection into sprint-level practice.