Better Project Reviews and Retrospectives with Confluence
Project retrospectives are a critical part of any team's growth.
After all, it's difficult to learn from your successes and mistakes if you don't take the time to review them. Research from Scott Tannenbaum, co-author of "Teams that Work" (2020) shows that teams that regularly hold 15-60 minute debriefing, review, or retrospective sessions achieve a 20-25% improvement in overall productivity. Moreover, it's difficult for other teams to learn from your successes and mistakes later if they're not first documented.
But there are barriers to the retrospective process — structuring the meeting, collecting and aggregating feedback, and identifying action items.
Whether you're trying to introduce a culture of retrospectives to your company or find better feedback documentation, you'll find Confluence to be a powerful tool. Confluence helps teams organize and structure their project completion feedback, create easy rituals to ensure points of post-launch connection, and more effectively analyze projects.
Templates to organize project feedback
One of the first challenges of retrospectives? Getting people to want to be a part of them. They can seem daunting, meandering, or chaotic, even.
It’s no easy feat to foster a culture of retrospectives, but Confluence offers a helping hand with a veritable cornucopia of templates.
Confluence templates provide structure, which makes the process easier for everyone involved — facilitators and participants. Facilitators won’t have to face the terror of an empty page because it’s filled for them. And participants won’t have to wonder what’s being asked of them because it’s clear from the template.
Templates also make it easy to establish a ritual of holding a retrospective for any project. (Add it as the final action.)
Some templates that can help teams prepare for and complete successful retrospective meetings are:
These templates help you efficiently organize and structure your project completion feedback. Since you keep them in Confluence, they're easy to reference during future meetings, which makes it simple to show your team's growth over time.
Collect all the feedback at once
The next challenge of project reviews is collecting and aggregating feedback. And that goes for in-house or remote teams.
Confluence is collaborative by nature. You can add as many team members as you like to a Confluence page or whiteboard and collect all those members’ feedback simultaneously from wherever they are.
Confluence gives you flexibility in feedback, too. Leave comments on pages. Use sticky notes and emojis on whiteboards. Or even embed images, gifs, or content from other tools as smartlinks.
And when it’s all said and done, your team’s feedback is in one place, which becomes your single source of truth. See ya, information silos.
Follow up with action items and due dates
The last challenge of retrospectives? Follow-up. You learn a lot in retrospectives. But if you forget your learnings, they don’t do you much good.
The biggest benefit of project reviews is that you learn. You learn where you made mistakes — where workloads were disproportionate between team members, whether timelines weren’t set realistically, where blockers weren't identified early enough. You learn where you made the right choices. Document these so you can avoid the mistakes and replicate the successes in the future.
You can use Confluence to add, assign, and view follow-up items from your retrospective, and you can do so during the project review. With Confluence’s Jira integration, you can also connect Jira tasks to your review page, so no matter where your teams work, everybody has access to their action items.
Then, because you kept all that feedback and those tasks in one place, and because Confluence makes your team’s information easily searchable, your whole organization is in the know. (Or the ones whose permissions you’ve set to be allowed to view, anyway.)
Better project retros and reviews with Confluence
Documenting project completion feedback benefits the entire organization, especially when it’s available to everyone. The retrospective from one team could serve as valuable reference material for another team down the line. In this way, using Confluence to document your project completion feedback is a way of enriching your entire company.
Try Confluence for free today and discover how it can help you more effectively and efficiently document feedback on completed projects.
