Phase 4: Improve
Adapt and optimize with retrospectives, process improvements, team health checks, and velocity analysis.
Purpose
The Improve phase closes the sprint cycle with reflection and optimization. It covers retrospectives, process improvement planning, team health monitoring, velocity trend analysis, and post-mortems for significant incidents.
Skills
Retrospective
/pm:retrospective <project>Facilitates a sprint retrospective — captures what went well, what didn't, and actionable improvements. Uses structured formats like Start/Stop/Continue.
Output: Retro findings, action items, improvement backlog → .project/<project>/04-improve.md
Process Improvement
/pm:process-improvement <project>Analyzes recurring pain points across sprints and proposes process changes. Tracks improvement experiments and their outcomes.
Output: Pain point analysis, improvement proposals, experiment tracking → .project/<project>/04-improve.md
Team Health
/pm:team-health <project>Assesses team health across dimensions like psychological safety, workload balance, skill development, and collaboration quality.
Output: Team health scorecard, trend analysis, recommended actions → .project/<project>/04-improve.md
Velocity Analysis
/pm:velocity-analysis <project>Analyzes velocity trends over multiple sprints. Identifies patterns, predicts future capacity, and flags anomalies.
Output: Velocity trend chart, capacity forecast, anomaly flags → .project/<project>/04-improve.md
Post-mortem
/pm:post-mortem <project>Conducts a blameless post-mortem for significant incidents or failures. Documents timeline, root causes, contributing factors, and preventive actions.
Output: Incident timeline, root cause analysis, preventive actions → .project/<project>/04-improve.md
After Improve
After Improve, see Utility Skills for cross-phase tools like risk assessment, decision logging, and capacity planning.