This week I attended a Schaumburg Microsoft .NET
Technologies meetup. The title of this
meetup was “Improve your Retrospectives with Agile Kaizen!" and was
presented by Angela Dugan. I decided to
attend after reading the first three words of the title, “Improve your
Retrospectives”. In today’s world, there
is so much information at your fingertips that it would be very easy to do a little
research on Agile Kaizen. I didn’t know
if Agile Kaizen was a tool, a process, or something else. What Agile Kaizen was didn't seem important to me as I knew
Retrospectives suck or at least many of the ones that I attend do. This was enough for me to want to attend with
an open mind without doing any other research on Agile Kaizen.
Overall, the presentation was good with half of it on
Retrospectives in general and half explaining Agile Kaizen. I won’t go into detail on the content, but wanted
to share one of the main points that I took from the presentation. That main point may be obvious after hearing
it, but it took attending to really step back and understand. That main point to me was to get a refresher
on Retrospectives. To be clear, it is
not that I don’t know what a Retrospective is and what it should accomplish, but sometimes listening to
someone present and go over basics helps you step back and get those basics
back into memory. To me, this is similar
to tackling in football or shooting a free throw in basketball. When you get bad at either of these, you step
back and either self-analyze or get someone to explain how to tackle or shoot a
free throw. Simply saying my free throws
suck or my tackling sucks is not acceptable and the same applies for Retrospectives.
With the basics fresh in my mind, I can focus on those first
before bringing Agile Kaizen into the mix.
After that, I can try to convince the team to have our Retrospectives at
a bar with a one drink minimum for everyone.
Ok, maybe Angela recommended it was a one drink maximum, but I won’t count.
Peace yo!
