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🏁 🔐 🏁 FRONT MATTER 🏁 🔐 🏁

Goals of this document: Providing a bit more detail about one possible way to facilitate a project reflection to optimize for drawing out the most meaningful and useful lessons to the project team and the rest of 18F.

People who have worked on this: Alex Pandel, Laura Gerhardt, Anne Petersen, Colin Murphy

Purpose and intended audience: Hopefully this will provide anyone who might be tasked with facilitating a project reflection with a starting place to help them plan to make the best use of their (& participants’!) time.

Last updated: 9/26/2024 by Ryan Ganser - Q2ADAABDt o align with updates to templates and make messaging more plain language

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Guide for running a project reflection

This is by no means the only/right way to do this, BUT, for anyone who wants to get a head start and leverage a style started by Alex Pandel and is now the recommended way for 18F projects in order to ensure that their lessons are shared.

Why conduct a project reflection

Our work as federal technology consultants is unique. By conducting project reflections, we can learn what our best practices are and amplify them and work to resolve systemic concerns that might be holding us back. Project reflections also help us assess organization-wide hypotheses about how we work.

Roles

Requestor Often the project lead or the account manager (AM) who will reach out to a facilitator and help liaise between the project team and the facilitator

Participants Project or initiative members who will contribute their experience and reflect on what occurred on a project, what the outcomes of a project were, and how their contributions impact the project outcomes.

Facilitator Primarily guides the conversation and synthesizes the raw notes into a summary that those outside the project can understand**.**

Running a project reflection

1. Schedule the Reflection

[Requestor or Facilitator] Schedule 1.5-2 hours for the reflection session (2 hours is highly recommended for sessions with more than ~6 participants, or teams encountering challenges).
1. Aim to get this on the calendar at least 2 weeks in advance, to give yourself time to find a facilitator and for them to prep properly.
2. Invite all members of the project team (consider the AM, Executive Sponsors where possible, and anyone who was meaningfully involved in the project (occasionally this includes other members of the leadership team, significant non-project contributors, and partner team members, etc).
3. Write a quick note in the team’s Slack channel giving them a heads up that this is coming (example note here).

2. Prepping

[Requestor and Facilitator] Planning, facilitating and synthesizing a reflection session well will likely take somewhere between 5-8 hours from the facilitator. Budget for and plan your time accordingly. For final reflections, be sure to reserve enough budget for the facilitator and all participants to bill for their time (this should be a given for quarterly reflections, since the project will still be in-flight).
[Requestor] Plan for a relatively neutral party to facilitate. Sometimes it will make sense for the Account Manager (AM) to do this, but in most cases it’s useful for the AM to be a participant with the rest of the team. The default should be to create a request for facilitation from the TLC crew in that repository.
[Facilitator] Prepare the documents that you will use in the facilitation.
1. Make a copy of the project reflection conversation guide and move it to the project team folder, ensuring that the team has access. Customize as needed. This is the document that you will use to facilitate the session with the team.
2. (Optional) Make an additional notes document that you will use to capture dialog during the facilitation. Capturing direct (unattributed) quotes can highlight key points in the synthesized summary.
3. Pro tip: preview the summary template but do not make a copy yet. There should be room for discussion and unpacking in the moment; the filled-out summary template should be a follow-up artifact that the facilitator synthesizes after the session itself. (Why not mural)
[Facilitator] Touch base with the Project Lead to see if there are any topics in particular that they recommend devoting some time to in the reflection.
1. Depending on the topic(s), you can either add them as specific questions in the doc (trying to avoid more than ~6-7 prompts total), or just keep them in your back pocket as follow-up questions to probe on towards the end of the session if they don’t already come up naturally before then. Keep in mind you may need to timebox items.
2. If you know that a project is at a particularly challenging moment and the reflection might be contentious, I have found it helpful to send out a short survey ahead of time to all participants, giving each person some space to surface the issues they feel are most important to reflect on, so that you can be best prepared to factor those priorities into your facilitation. In the past, I’ve used prompts like “I’ll be disappointed if we come away from this reflection NOT having talked about...” and “Anything else you want me to know to make the best use of our time reflecting on this project together?” in this kind of survey to good effect. (Example Slack note sharing survey link here.)
3. Pull the project goal from either the previous reflection, or the project’s internal kickoff doc ahead of time, and pre-set it into the doc you’ll be reflecting in, as a starting point for discussion.
[Facilitator] Review the Project Health data for the project, in the airtable dashboard. Check to see which attributes of project health were consistently green, yellow, or red. Note weeks when things went from good to bad or bad to good. You can use this data to discuss with a Project Lead prior or prompt the team during the reflection.
[Facilitator] 2-3 days ahead of the scheduled session, drop a note in Slack to give the team a heads up on the prompts so participants have the chance to gather their thoughts ahead of time if they’d like (example note here).