Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Retrospectives


I mentioned in my last post that I'm on the blog team for the PMI Netherlands Summit, taking place June 13th in Zeist - The Netherlands. One of the sessions is on retrospectives; it's titled Retrospectives: your lessons learned on steroids to help your team / project in your continuous improvement. 

A key tenant of agile projects is to inspect and adapt and that is the purpose of retrospectives. We use these as opportunities to help us identify ways to improve. We should be conducting retrospectives on a regular basis, normally at the end of each iteration.

This past weekend I was at the PMI Leadership Meeting for the communities. After the official program ended, the Agile Community got together and had a retrospective of our work since our last time getting together. The idea of retrospectives can be applied to operations as well as projects. The idea is the same, pick a time, take a step back, and think about how you can work together better. We came up with some actions to help us better deliver value to our customers going forward. You should try it, and if you don't know how, maybe you should think about attending the conference.