Time to reflect?
Just recently I’ve started to notice the worrying signs that I am turning into my Dad. It started a year or so ago with a bit of low level lawnmower envy but came to a disconcerting head this weekend when I found myself going bananas at my girlfriend for putting an empty Quality Street tin in the bin. You see I’d been eyeing it up for weeks thinking it’d be perfect for keeping all my screws in the shed. I’ll be on lager and lime, smoking Hamlets down the allotment if this carries on!
The trouble is it only seems two minutes ago that, as a young whippersnapper, I’d be complaining about my dad lazing about on the sofa on Saturday afternoons watching telly or dozing. Now I absolutely love it! I justify this as my ‘reflection time’ – time that I carve out of the day to reflect on the week.
Unfortunately it clearly seems that this pastime (of the gods) means I’m growing old but, through my recent agile project management training <tenuous work link>, I’ve also learned that reflection is a central idea in Japanese culture. “Hansei-Kaizen” is the process of relentless reflection (Hansei) and continuous improvement (Kaizen) and this is a key aspect of the Agile project management principles.
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behaviour accordingly”. The Agile Manifesto
I’ve found this element of Agile enlightening in terms of running my projects here at Code. No longer is it the case that the whole team only gets together once at the beginning of the project to run through the brief and once at the end to talk about how it all went. We set regular team meetings to take 15 mins to reflect on a particular meeting or a stage of work to look at what went well and what could be improved.
Our reflection or ‘retrospective’ meetings (to give them their correct title) take place at the end of each project stage or ‘sprint’ and follow some simple guidelines:
- Assess what is and isn’t working on the project
- Typically 15–30 minutes
- Whole team participates (including client)
These retrospectives are aimed to help individuals develop as well as identify things that should be improved in our company and process. It is therefore crucial that we share any observations and learnings with others in the business who can effect change.
For a good starting point on ‘retrospectives’: http://www.agilecollab.com/agile-retrospectives
This all seems incredibly obvious now. It’s hardly rocket science to think that people should benefit from looking back during the life of a project so that they can learn from their experiences and apply this learning to upcoming stages and then future projects. It’s also not surprising that people react well to receiving feedback and encouragement face to face. However, all too often projects I’ve run in the past left little to no time for reflection during the development and this has led to a lack of clarity on where the project is leading or, more importantly, where it is supposed to lead.
So…you may have already lapsed on your New Year’s resolutions, but it’s not too late to make a new one: to take more time out to reflect.
Now time for a quick doze I think…goodbye cruel youth.
~Jamie
