Little Known Secrets of Performing Self-Retrospectives, The Agile Way!

If you have few years of experience in project management, most likely you have come across agile practices. You are conducting periodical retrospectives at the end of each iteration or release. For agile practices, such retrospectives act like a compass which guides you towards true north.

Photo Credit: gothick_matt's Flickr photostream

In retrospectives, essentially you are inspecting what is expected in the specific iteration or a release. You learn through your mistakes and focus on what you can do better in the next iteration.

And, since your focus is on constant improvement, you see consistent improvements in the project. Isn’t it?

The opportunity here is to apply the same “improving by retrospection” principle in your personal life as well.  It can be applied to measure your personal performance. If we consider our life as a film, you are playing various characters in your life. Some examples of such characters are: Son, father, spouse, student, musician, friend, etc.  You can perform at your best given you have defined set of measurable goals attached with each of such characters.

So the question is how you can measure your personal performance in each of the characters you are playing?

Here is an agile mechanism to handle this:

1. At the start of every week define a set of measurable goals for each of the characters you are going to play in that week.
2. As the week passes by, record your activities in a journal.
3. In the weekend, pick a character at a time and perform a retrospective:
   • What went well?
   • What did not go well?
   • What can be improved and taken to the next level?
4. While starting the next week, align yourself with the answers you found for the above questions.

Such retrospectives enable you to align your actions and help you in going to the next level.  All you need is willingness to go to the next level and a pen and a paper!  Worth trying.

See Also:

1. Attributes of Agile Project Management
2. Directness, A Deviant Act That Is More Than Worth In Agile Project Management
3. 7 Sunday Questions To Muse Upon
4. Twelve Traits of Dependable Project Managers
5. 7 Acts of Poor Managers Who Gift Cancer To Their People, Their Clients and Their Businesses
6. How To Inaugurate Effectiveness In Your Project Team
7. 10 Peaks For Creating Performance Focused Teams