Project Retrospective
Reflect on what went well, what didn't, and what to change, one honest conversation at a time. Try it in Elium.
The Project Retrospective Template helps your team reflect on what went well, what didn't, and what to change for next time. Go beyond surface-level feedback to capture actionable insights that improve how you work. It's the ritual that turns good teams into great ones, one honest conversation at a time.
Category
Operations
What is it?
A project retrospective template is a structured document for reviewing a completed project or phase, capturing what went well, what went wrong, and what the team would do differently. It provides a repeatable format that turns a reflective conversation into documented, actionable improvements.
Retrospectives are common in agile teams but rare in traditional project management, and when they do happen, the output is often a whiteboard photo that nobody revisits. The value of a retrospective is not in the meeting itself but in what the organisation does with the findings afterwards. A structured template ensures the discussion produces documented actions with owners and deadlines, and that the resulting insights are searchable and referenceable by future project teams.
Who should use this template?
This template is for teams that run projects and want to learn from them:
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Project Managers: facilitate end-of-phase or end-of-project retrospectives and document outcomes that inform future planning
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Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: run sprint or iteration retrospectives with consistent structure across teams
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Programme Managers: aggregate retrospective findings across multiple projects to identify systemic patterns and improvements
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Team Leads: conduct team-level retrospectives after significant deliverables or milestones
How to create this template in Elium
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Open the Template Builder: Go to your profile menu and select the Template Builder tab, or click “+ Create” and choose “Create a new template”.
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Set the scope: Choose an icon, enable the template, and decide whether it applies platform-wide or to specific spaces (e.g. Project Management or Agile Teams).
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Add structured fields: Click “Field” to add metadata: text fields for project name and phase, a user field for facilitator, a date field, a multi-user field for participants, and a tag field for retrospective type (pre-populate with “End-of-Project”, “End-of-Phase”, “Sprint”, “Incident”). Mark project name and facilitator as mandatory.
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Build the retrospective structure: Use the “+” button to add content blocks: a text block for context and scope, text blocks for what went well and what went wrong (encourage bullet points with root causes), a text block for proposed changes, and a table block for the action tracker (columns: action, owner, deadline, status).
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Preview and save: Review the template layout, then save. Project teams can now select it when running retrospectives, and you can apply it to existing content in bulk.
How AI helps
Capture faster. Record your retrospective meeting and feed the transcript into Elium’s AI. It extracts themes (grouping feedback into what went well, what went wrong, and proposed actions) so the facilitator refines the output rather than taking notes during the conversation.
Retrieve smarter. A project manager asks Elium’s AI: “What recurring issues have appeared in our retrospectives over the last six months?” The AI identifies patterns across multiple retrospectives (common themes like scope creep, late stakeholder feedback, or resource constraints) so the team addresses systemic problems rather than isolated incidents.
Why teams use Elium for this
Most retrospectives produce insight that disappears. The team discusses what went wrong, agrees on improvements, and moves on. Then the same mistakes reappear. Elium breaks this cycle: structured templates ensure the conversation produces documented actions, search lets future teams find relevant retrospectives before they plan, and accumulated retrospectives reveal patterns that no single review can show.
Bouygues Construction, with 53,500 employees across 80 countries, uses Elium to centralise project knowledge. Retrospectives and lessons learned from completed projects remain accessible to teams starting similar work, turning individual project experience into organisational learning.
Common questions about project retrospective templates
A project retrospective is a structured review held after a project or phase to evaluate what went well, what went wrong, and what the team should change. Without retrospectives, teams repeat the same mistakes across projects because lessons from past work are never captured, documented, or made accessible to future teams.
A complete retrospective includes project context, a structured review of successes and failures with root causes, specific improvement actions with owners and deadlines, optional team sentiment indicators, and an action tracker for follow-up. The template should produce searchable, referenceable documentation, not disposable meeting notes.
Standardised retrospectives create a searchable library of project learnings. They ensure improvement actions have owners and deadlines rather than vague intentions. Over time, patterns emerge across retrospectives that reveal systemic issues, enabling organisational improvements that individual project reviews cannot identify alone.
Schedule the retrospective within one week of project completion while details are fresh. Use a neutral facilitator. Start with facts, not blame: review the timeline and deliverables before discussing what went wrong. Limit the session to producing three to five specific, owned actions rather than a long list of observations.
A retrospective is typically shorter and action-focused. It asks “what do we change next time?” and produces immediate commitments. A lessons learned session is broader and documentation-focused. It asks “what did we learn?” and produces a reference document. Retrospectives drive behaviour change; lessons learned sessions preserve institutional knowledge.
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