Overview of TCGen methodology utilized for Project Retrospectives and Process Reviews. This is conducted as a series of workshops that help a team constructively build a prioritized consensus around a few high-value improvements to pursue.

Introduction

Project retrospectives provide an important source of input to understanding what has gone wrong and what forces led to those problems.

The pillars of our approach are to:

• Establish a timeline that provides a basis for shared interpretation and causality of events
• Get participation across a spectrum of teams that allows us to document the problems while also providing some inoculation for a sense of blame that can hamper progress
• Diagnose and document root causes across multiple perspectives

Collectively these ensure shared understanding among cross-functional teams, and (crucially) between teams and leadership that we’ve seen be very effective in changing organizational behavior and improving outcomes.

Methodology Overview

The methodology centers around a root cause analysis of three critical events in the project timeline. Root causes from one project are then compared with those found in other projects, and with themes identified through interviews and analysis of metrics.

The diagram below illustrates how three “key events” in the project retrospective are utilized to explore root causes, using a fishbone analysis, which in turn are synthesized to find patterns across projects.

Reference: Developed for Apple’s New Product Process (ANPP)

Key Steps In Process

1. Pre-work. Create a shared 1-slide visual Project Timeline of major events that forms the foundation for discussion. Determine attendees and schedule for workshops.
   • Prep checklist
2. Session 1 agenda: share goals and process with team. Review Timeline to jog team’s memory and ask them to add any omitted events. Ensure Timeline captures most important events.
3. Async: each team member places three votes on the events that they believe were most impactful of GTM. We tally and sort the most important to the top.
4. Session 2 agenda: confirm or revise the voted priorities for top 3 events. Familiarize team with fishbone analysis process to identify multiple root causes. Explore 3-levels of causation for first event (and second, time permitting) and document causes. Vote on the root causes to surface the most important.
5. Session 3 agenda: Confirm or refine the prioritization of events. Conduct fishbone analysis and finalize documented root causes. Review and recap with team.

Constructing a Timeline

We start by constructing a one-page timeline to form the basis of discussion. It's important for the team to see everything on a single page in order to jog their memory on what happened and in what order. This may be done graphically by drawing on a timeline, but we leverage a Sheet that makes it easy to take notes. Here is a starting template.

Instructions for Asynchronous Dot-Voting