The Plan vs. Actual retrospective
Compare what you planned with what happened, find out why they differ, and decide what to keep and what to change next time.
Plan vs. Actual puts the plan and the result side by side and asks why they differ. It follows the after-action review, which the U.S. Army developed to learn from its training exercises: start with a plain comparison of what was intended and what happened, and end with what to sustain and what to improve.
It's good at something most retros skip: checking the plan itself. A team can work well and still miss because the plan was wrong, and this format shows that without making it anyone's fault.
The four columns
- What was planned? The intended outcome, objectives and plan of action. Good cards are specific and checkable: "Ship the import feature behind a flag by the 14th," not "Do the import work."
- What happened? What actually occurred, stated as facts. Dates, numbers, events: "Shipped on the 21st, with the flag off for two days." Opinions go in the next column.
- Why the difference? Root causes behind the gap between plan and reality. Good cards name a cause you can act on: "We estimated before we'd seen the old data."
- Sustain & improve: What we keep doing and what we change next time. The seeds of your action items: concrete enough for someone to own.
When to use it
Use it after anything with a clear plan: a quarter, a release, a migration, a launch. It suits a quarter-end look back well. Run it when things went well, too: a plan you beat is as worth understanding as one you missed.
For a routine sprint with no plan beyond the backlog, Start · Stop · Continue fits better. Straight after a release or an incident, use Quick Review. At the end of a long project, where credit matters too, try Project Wrap-up.
How to run it
- Set the stage (5 minutes). Name the work you're reviewing and share the written plan, if there is one. Say the aim is to understand the gap, not to find who caused it. The Prime Directive helps.
- Write alone (10 minutes). Everyone writes cards in all four columns. Ask for facts in What happened? and causes in Why the difference?.
- Group (5 to 10 minutes). Merge duplicates so each cause appears once, with all its cards.
- Vote (3 minutes). Spend votes on the causes and improvements that matter most.
- Discuss (20 minutes). For each topic, check the facts, then ask why until you reach something the team can change. Watch for hindsight: ask what the team knew at the time.
- Agree actions (5 to 10 minutes). Turn the strongest Sustain & improve cards into two or three action items, each with an owner and a due date.
- Close (2 minutes). Read the actions back, and ask what was missed.
Tips
- Write the plan down before the work starts. If there was no plan this time, that's often the first finding.
- Keep facts and causes apart. If a What happened? card says "the vendor was slow," ask how slow. The reason goes in the next column.
- Look for gaps in both directions. Finishing early is a gap too, and its causes show you what to repeat.
Run it in Scrums
Choose New session → Retrospective on your team's page and pick Plan vs. Actual from the formats. Everyone writes privately, and other people's cards stay face-down until the facilitator reveals them, so nobody's version of events sets the tone. Then group similar cards (or let Auto-group cluster them), vote with hidden tallies, and discuss the topics in order, adding action items with an owner and a due date. Open action items come back in the next retro's Review step. Retros are anonymous by default, and Scrums is free.
Try a retro in your browser, or sign up free.
Questions
Is Plan vs. Actual the same as an after-action review?
It asks the same things: what was intended, what happened, why they differ, and what to sustain and improve. The Army's version also has a set procedure, led by someone who sets the ground rules at the start. These four columns, run as an ordinary retro, give you the core of it.
What if we didn't have a written plan?
Rebuild it briefly at the start: what did people believe the goal and the deadline were? If people remember different plans, that's your first finding.