PM-Mastery

Getting Our Retrospectives Right: It's Not Just a Checkbox! With Dave Westgarth

• Walt Sparling • Season 1 • Episode 70

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In this episode:

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dave Westgarth, a delivery manager based in the northeast of England, where we explore the art of project management mastery. From his rich experience in technology projects to his deep understanding of Agile and Lean principles, Dave shares insights that are crucial for anyone looking to elevate their project management skills.

We discuss the transformative power of Agile retrospectives—how they are not merely a requirement, but rather an opportunity for teams to enhance their collaboration, reflect on successes, and address challenges. Through engaging dialogues, we unpack the myriad of techniques that can invigorate these sessions, ensuring they remain impactful rather than routine.

Moreover, Dave reveals how Lean methodologies serve as the backbone of many Agile strategies, enhancing the efficiency of project delivery and enabling managers to streamline processes for maximum value. His passion for these frameworks is palpable, inspiring listeners to consider how these principles could reshape their own projects.

Communication emerges as another critical theme throughout our discussion, with Dave emphasizing its pivotal role in project success. By understanding diverse communication styles within their teams, project managers can tailor their approaches for better outcomes.

This episode resonates with the principles of community, as we reflect on the importance of learning from peers in the project management realm. We invite you to discover these powerful insights that can redefine your perception of project management. Don’t forget to subscribe for more episodes filled with valuable knowledge and tools that can help project managers thrive.

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Intro/Outro:

Welcome to the PM Mastery Podcast. This podcast is all about helping you master your project management skills by sharing tips, tricks, tools and training to get you to the next level, while sharing the stories of other project managers on their journey in project management. And now here's your host, walt Sparling.

Walt Sparling:

Okay, welcome everybody to the current edition of PM Mastery, and today I have with me Dave Westgarth. Welcome.

Dave Westgarth:

Hey, walt, thanks a lot for having me along with me, dave Westgarth, welcome.

Walt Sparling:

Hey, walt, thanks a lot for having me along. It's good to have you on. We're going to talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then we're going to dive into a little program that we've all been working on recently and dive into the details of that. So let's start out a little bit like where are you from? I'm kind of thinking you're up somewhere.

Dave Westgarth:

Bit of a giveaway. Yeah, so I'm based in the northeast of England. I'm in a city called Sunderland, which is the best city in the region, but the biggest is Newcastle. That's the one probably most of you listeners have heard of. Okay, and I work at the moment as a delivery manager, which sort of straddles a lot of different strands of delivery, and the way that me and you met was through the pure project management program that we're working on together, which has been great for me to get into. Through. More guys like you really round out my experience and hear from guys on the other side of the pond in different industries and different teams, different organizations, so really a bit of an accelerator for me, so that's been a pleasure as well.

Walt Sparling:

Great now, you had mentioned earlier, when we were talking, that you were. You were either finished with a project, so you're in between right now and now.

Dave Westgarth:

People are just throwing everything at you to keep you busy yeah, so I work in a consultancy in the uk and I've recently closed a project that I was part of. It was a a pretty short and punchy discovery style project, and now we're just waiting in the wings for that to come to fruition, to move to a full delivery um, and in the meantime I'm on what's affectionately known as the bench in consultancy um, and now I'm working on lots of internal initiatives to a keep me busy and B drive some more value into the business while I've got a bit more time on my hands.

Walt Sparling:

So what is it that you deliver?

Dave Westgarth:

when you say delivery, so typically I work on technology projects. Typically it will be software solutions, products or services. For example, the last project I was part of that discovery that I mentioned we were looking at doing a data mining project. We were working with an organization that had data assets spread all throughout the organization that they were looking to consolidate into something sensible like a database and then put some queries, requests and mine out some insights from that, which is a fairly typical one for organizations looking to have that data transformation. But we do everything. Our specialities are mainly around cloud, ai and data.

Dave Westgarth:

So a couple of other projects I've worked on we did a cloud transition for a gaming and gambling company, moving them from one provider to another so they could remain competitive and crack into the American market, as they're quite big in Europe but looking to expand the horizons in America and the one before that we did a data platform for a third sector or charity client and we weaved in all sorts of different data sort of assets, visualizations and insights, but we also embedded AI-powered features in there to help them drive out things like actionable insights. So what can we do to make things better? What can we do to improve our ways of working. How can we improve the morale of the staff? And that was really exciting. That was around the time that ChatGPT really popped, so getting to work with the latest and greatest and try and figure out how we made something profitable was a really interesting challenge as well. So, yeah, apologies, I felt like I've shellacked you with a lot there, but there's there's quite a lot of variance in consultancy, which is, yeah, a double-edged sword.

Walt Sparling:

Now, you had mentioned that we we met through the pure program and, uh, actually over the last few weeks, uh, we've had various folks on here, different instructors. Now you taught two courses for that program, correct?

Dave Westgarth:

I did indeed. Yeah, the first one was mastering Agile retrospectives, and retrospectives are something that's very close to my heart. It was something I posted about when I first started out on LinkedIn how to drive effective retrospective sessions, how to embed them as a continuous improvement habit. And my second course was around lean, lean thinking and lean delivery, and in Agile a lot of common roots can be traced back to lean. It's sort of a grandfather for all sorts of different Agile approaches, practices and strategies. So going back to the root on that and highlighting how much value is there was really exciting for me personally and I'm really excited to share that with other people who take on the course.

Walt Sparling:

So I'm actually taking your retrospective course right now. It's about three hours long. I've been sneaking it in during lunch trying to get through it over the last week. I'll probably finish it up tomorrow, but for someone who doesn't work in Agile all the time, it is something I think I've heard of in the past but never really understood anything about it. Now, going through your course, I'm like, oh okay, yeah, this is, yeah, this is a lot of stuff, a lot of ways to do, do the work and, um, I'm trying to remember some of the terminology that is totally new, that I've never heard before. So it's been good. And the lean, that's going to be an interesting one. I might do that one after I finish this so I can kind of keep on the same path. I'm trying to group all the classes that are similar.

Dave Westgarth:

Oh, nice, nice. And the retrospectives one I think will be great and I'd love to get your views because we were talking briefly before we started around how you work in a very different wrinkle of project management than I do and I think the collision of sort of my spin on retrospectives and then understanding how you can apply that in your context and in your wrinkle would be really interesting to me, because I've got no doubt there'll be some stuff in there that's good and useful, but I've also got no doubt there'll be stuff in there that you either can't do, isn't feasible to do, or just wouldn't be useful in your context.

Walt Sparling:

So that would be really helpful for me to understand as well yeah, I think, uh, looking back, I mean that's a common thing, like you said. Lesson learned I believe in doing lessons learned, but I believe in doing them throughout the project, not at the end. Uh, because I think you, you, you gain more, you share more if you do it throughout the project. But, uh, that is similar in that regards, I'm trying to think of some of those, a lot of the uh items that you cover in there. They're very structured, but they're very. There's a lot of ways. There's not any one way to do it, and that is what's interesting and that's what I'm thinking. When I take the quiz, I'm like boy. I hope I can remember all those different ones.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, and I suppose that's the. This is one of my sort of hot takes on retrospectives. A lot of people sort of roll their eyes, especially at the themed retrospectives. I don't know if you've gotten that section yet, but we can dig into that a little more. But I'm a very firm believer in retrospective sessions. If we ask the same questions for long enough, eventually we'll just start getting the same answers back and it's very easy for complacency to creep into those sessions and then the value that you're trying to capture quickly slips away. I think by having a catalog or a list of retrospective techniques, formats and templates to pick from, you really maximize your chances of capturing the value. And the overarching purpose of the retrospective is to find ways to increase quality and effectiveness. We're not going to be able to do that if we keep hammering the team with the same three or four questions every two to three weeks. So I'm a big advocate for keeping things fresh and moving it along where you can.

Walt Sparling:

That was one of the things I thought was interesting when you explained that in there and it was like, yeah, I like it's easy to do checklist and I'm a fan of checklist, but to your point it's, if it's just the same thing over and over and over again, does it become a check the box exercise as the checklist?

Dave Westgarth:

yeah, and one of the sort of common challenges I get on the themed retrospective front is a lot of a lot of practitioners just don't like themed retrospectives, and I fully accept that they're not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone's going to like doing a themed retrospective, and the often criticism or the often challenge that I get back is I prefer when we do a retrospective and everyone comes and discusses in an engaging way, and I sort of have to bite my tongue because I think well, of course I would like that as well, but people don't come engaged to these sessions because we want them to. We need to coax them into it and coach them through the session to drive that engagement through. Engagement doesn't just happen because we ask for it, and I think that that's the real sort of thing I'm trying to drive at in the session. With the variety that you've touched on, there's more than one way to skin the cat and drive that value through.

Walt Sparling:

How did you get actually involved in Pure? Because I think I don't think I actually started following you until after the Pure program and I mean I follow a lot of PM professionals but you were, and there's a couple of people that I've been introduced through the program and that's. The pm community is huge. So you know, it's like I I know a bunch, but then when you, when that peer program came up, I started. Now I found out about more people, so now I've got a lot more people I follow. How did you get involved?

Dave Westgarth:

yeah, I can just imagine they're now looking at the screen thinking who's this dodgy character from the northeast of england who's crept as we into this group, um? But yeah, I suppose the the first way I met joe, who's sort of the, the head of pure the ceo, joseph phillips. I took his capm course when I was very new to the industry and that was the first certification I ever took, um and that introduced me to joe. I then went through his psm1 course that I know that you're going through as we speak as well. So big thumbs up for that one um. And then just recently I've done his pmp as well, but by being part of joe's community and mailing list.

Dave Westgarth:

I got an email, I think it was, that came through with sort of a request for collaborators on this and I I had a course that I'd already done on retrospectives that I'd delivered live typically, and I thought this sounds like a good idea to sort of replatform this and get more people exposed to what I think are some fairly good ideas on retrospectives. So I filled the email back out and said, okay, I've got this course. This is roughly what it's done before. These are the topics I sort of touch on. Does this feel like a good fit?

Dave Westgarth:

Um, and thankfully joe and amanda came back and said yes, and I was. I was actually really pleased at that because I I was a little hesitant to do it because I thought, sitting on the outskirts of the pm community at large, I'm more sort of in the agile and the scrum spaces. I didn't know whether that could be perceived as a barrier or maybe perceived as a bit of a I don't know a splitting of a splitting of the community or a splitting of the interest or a splitting of the goals of the of the program. But I one of my sort of guiding mantras, on retrospectives especially, is if you're a traditional project manager working in a traditional environment, the number one agile practice you can embed to improve your effectiveness is regular retrospectives, and I'm really glad I've got the chance to sort of bring that into a PM-focused area like Pure, which has been great for me.

Walt Sparling:

Awesome. Yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing that up and definitely it's opened my eyes to an area that I have not been involved in the other course that you're doing on Lean. Now, I know that there's a few people that have done a couple courses and that one was that just a. Was Joe like hey, hey, do you have any other cool courses?

Dave Westgarth:

or yeah, yeah. So I got the retrospective one in and, um, I was asked are there any others that I would like to do or any other ideas that I've got? And then we bounced a couple of emails back and forth and joe actually suggested would you like to do something around lean and lean thinking? And I thought you know I haven't looked at lean for a while. That would be good for my development personally as well, and I'm I'm really glad I did, because lean.

Dave Westgarth:

I think even when you first learn about lean, you are impressed by it.

Dave Westgarth:

But when you go back to it with more experience and more projects under your belt, you have an even deeper appreciation for the sort of value that's on offer to you through lean, lean thinking and lean delivery.

Dave Westgarth:

So I was really pleased personally that I did it and I was really pleased that I was able to sort of illustrate, I hope, that lean is sort of the common root of a lot of things that you'll have seen in project management, that you'll have seen in agile delivery, that you'll have seen in project management, that you'll have seen in agile delivery, that you'll have seen in kanban setups, that you'll have seen in scrum setups and a lot of the sort of core principles and mantras can be traced back to those lean roots and I'm hoping people that run through this lean course will sort of see that and understand sort of the, as I think we we touched on it as being sort of a grandfather to these other approaches and I really do believe that, which is nice.

Dave Westgarth:

And another one of my sort of revelations as I was doing this course was if we just take lean and a bit of an understanding on theory of constraints, I think with those two areas you've got basically everything you need to be a truly effective project or delivery professional, which is, I think, nice. When you look around now and see the number of frameworks that come out every couple of years now, I think it's nice to have something where you think well, if I understand these two in some detail, I'm largely going to get the job done, which is really nice.

Walt Sparling:

Now you're doing the two and I know you've taken some of them. What is your impression of the courses that you've taken so far?

Dave Westgarth:

I like them.

Dave Westgarth:

It's great for me because there's a lot of people in different organizations, different industries and different wrinkles of project management who are coming at this from an angle that either I've disregarded because I'm focused on other things, or things I would just never have thought of because it's never going to come into my purview.

Dave Westgarth:

So some of the ones I've done your communication, one with Drew I've really enjoyed a lot of it I've sort of touched on before, but maybe not to the level of depth that you guys have gone to, and a lot of it's given me different things to think about that I can try and weave into my approach. But also project managers who've sort of touched on other things around adaptive ways of working. So Brooks, for example, has done the Adaptive Ways of Working course and while a lot of that was quite familiar to me, again it was good to understand how Clint, as a practitioner, leverages his individual skills and experience to sort of complement the adaptive ways of working that he's trying to embed in his teams. So I think across the board the thing I've really liked is the personality and the creativity and the style of each instructor comes through. It doesn't feel like a static course teaching a core syllabus which I think is really nice course teaching a core syllabus, which I think is really nice.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, it's quite a diverse group and quite a diverse set of courses. So, yeah, I'm enjoying it.

Dave Westgarth:

One of my original sort of project management coaches. He had this sort of catchphrase, which was you'll take what your house gives you. And what he meant by that was was it's no good for you to try and manage projects in the way that I manage them, because I've got 20 years experience to lean on that you don't have. What you need to do is take your personality, skills, communication, style and apply them in a way that allows you to get the job done, and I think that that sort of personalization, that creativity and that pragmatic approach that everyone has slightly different slants on really comes through on these courses. So I'm I'm confident. For example, say, you take my course and you think I don't know what I'm talking about. The nice thing is you've got more than 20 other instructors and one of them will be able to speak to you in your style, so that's another really nice bonus, I think.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah and there's a lot of uh cross work in the courses, like, uh, the communication. There's like three different people that are doing something involved in communication. Either it's heavier involved on, like melissa's, heavier on the stakeholder side, um, I believe uh, there's one that I haven't taken, but I know of that gets in more into the soft skills which ultimately helps you with your communication. So there's a lot of the courses that have complimentary material in them.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, I said the same to Brooke because our courses, there's a lot of parallels there. But even though we are talking about the same to brooks, because our courses, there's a lot of, um, a lot of parallels there, but even though we are talking about the same thing, the content is is different, which is nice, and it's the same. On the communication ones have done like, um, I think even tanya's course touches on communications in some ways, but she's thinking very sort of honed in on risk communications, communicating, risk communicating yep, exactly, yeah, exactly, so that's.

Dave Westgarth:

It's really nice to think you're not going to get on risk communications, communicating risk, communicating trade-offs Yep, exactly, yeah, exactly. So it's really nice to think you're not going to get the same risk management, you're not going to get the same retrospective, you're not going to get the same communications lessons from every instructor. You'll get what they think is useful.

Walt Sparling:

Right, and then you put them together and, like you said, choose what works best for you.

Dave Westgarth:

But understand that a lot of the similarities are there for a reason because they work yeah, it's funny you pick up communication because I've heard communication is quite important for project managers. I don't know what you think, but I've heard it's important yeah I think it's pretty high up there in a percentage.

Walt Sparling:

Well, I appreciate you coming on. I know it took a few weeks to get this worked out Everybody's schedule is a little crazy but it was good chatting with you After taking your course. This was the first time I've actually got to have a conversation with you, so this was good.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, and I feel, before we wrap it up, I should probably apologize for my accent. I'm a victim of circumstance. I wouldn't have chosen this accent if I had the choice. So apologies to your listeners and I hope that you can roughly understand what I'm saying.

Walt Sparling:

I'm an accent guy. It breaks things up. I think it's great.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, there's a lot of the southern accents within the team that I really enjoy. Those are really cool.

Walt Sparling:

Yep, yeah, accents are great. It does. It adds a little mystique. We actually on my last team I had a pm that was uh, from the uk and of course, on my podcast I have the intro, and outro is a female from the uk and when she was on meetings and she'd be running meetings, I'm like you know, everyone would just just listen and they just loved her voice, you know. And then they would say is that the same? Is she the one that does your intro on your podcast?

Dave Westgarth:

And I'm like no completely different.

Walt Sparling:

That was a voice artist I hired, but it was, uh, it's interesting and it's like they would just, no matter what, did you get get all the information. Yeah, it's like I just love the voice.

Dave Westgarth:

Where was she from? Do you know what the accent was?

Walt Sparling:

Oh, no, no, I'll have to ask her, and I am you.

Intro/Outro:

Yeah.

Dave Westgarth:

I would volunteer to do your intros and outros, but I don't think it would do any good for the listeners of your podcast.

Walt Sparling:

I don't think it would be the same.

Dave Westgarth:

I don't think it would be the same. Yeah, there might be a slight dip in the listenership, who knows?

Walt Sparling:

Maybe I'll get you to come in and do some kind of advertising in the middle of it. Just add a little interest.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, absolutely.

Walt Sparling:

All right, Dave, I appreciate you coming on and I hope we'll have maybe some more conversations in the future.

Dave Westgarth:

Yeah, thanks for having me on Pleasure to join you. Thanks.

Walt Sparling:

All right and for everyone else, we'll see you on the next episode of PM Mastery.

Intro/Outro:

Thanks for listening to the PM Mastery podcast at wwwpm-masterycom. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player. Until next time, keep working on your craft.