Thanks for sharing these suggestions David. From my experience retrospectives are one of the more poorly supported aspects of agile/lean development practices. They make good sense and most people just assume that it's as easy as getting the team together and room and talking about what went well and what didn't. But as you pointed out retrospectives take real facilitation skills. For longer projects with a large number of retrospectives I would also suggest introducing some 'themes' into your retrospectives like "How's our teamwork", or "How well are we following coding practices" which makes the retropsectives a little less 'predictable' and as a result less 'boring'. Some good references for running Retrospectives (which by the way don't need to be confined to Agile projects) include a book by Ester and Larsen: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great You can see a video presentation from the authores at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqtPZYigfNI