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.

Learning Outside the Box

I'm on the blog team for the PMI Netherlands Summit, taking place June 13th in Zeist - The Netherlands. One of the tracks is Learning from Outside the Box. I appreciate the aspect this track is taking. Sometimes you can learn valuable lessons when you get outside your normal area of focus.

I recently spoke at a conference in the US that focused on health care, the HIMSS conference in New Orleans back in March. Some of the attendees of my session were familiar with agile, but many were not and based on my audience, agile was not being used much in healthcare. For them, this was a learning outside the box experience, but also for me.

I have not done any projects in the healthcare field. I learned something about the field based on the questions my audience was asking. It has peaked my curiosity and I've started researching the types of projects that this industry deals with and started thinking about how agile can support this field.

So if you're in the EMEA region and looking for a good conference, check out the PMI Netherlands Summit. There are some strong speakers such as Dr Lynn Crawford and Dr Terry Cooke-Davies and a lot of interesting topics.