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Personal Retrospective: How Did I Do?

On the Stone Circle blog, Nynke Andering gives us an inside view of her process of self-retrospective, which she uses after a consulting engagement. She shows us not only her questions, but her answers, in four categories: Collaboration, Learning, Consulting, Responsibility.

Here is an example from the Collaboration category:
  • Did I enjoy other people’s successes?
    Tremendously! It was wonderful to watch my colleagues fly. And I hope the whole team gets to enjoy some more flights.

  • Did I accept other people’s limitations?
    Ow, that’s a hard one. I tend to overestimate capabilities of others. And I did that again, to a certain extent...
My list and yours may differ from Nynke's. But the idea is a good one, and worth a look now, while you can still plan this for your current engagement - weeks afterward, when things calm down, it may be too late to be helpful. It does not apply only for consultants, either. A permanent employee could find this beneficial, perhaps in preparation for a project retrospective.  High-performance work, in the changeable environment of software development, requires continuous improvement, which in turn requires this kind of timely reflection.

Nynke Andering is one of the people behind AgileOpen, the European Open Space "unconference" on Agile software development.

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