New Year's Resolutions and Retrospectives

 

Tis the season - for New Year's resolutions.

Like lessons (rarely) learned sessions at the end of projects, annual resolutions have received their fair share of ridicule. For gym rats like myself, a humorous way to help shake off the doldrums of the post-holidays blues is to see all the new faces in my gym for the first couple of weeks of January and watch their numbers dwindle back as the days pass.

Daniel Pink's latest Pinkcast provides some good ideas for making annual resolutions more effective as does Elizabeth Grace Saunders' recent article in HBR.

But if we only wait till year end to reflect and decide what we'd like to change, that is likely insufficient. Resolutions might be a good way of addressing a major improvement such as getting more exercise or saving more money but what about all of the small improvements we can make throughout the year?

The same can be said about retrospectives.

While they provide a scheduled opportunity at the end of a period of work to reflect and identify improvement experiments, nowhere in the Scrum Guide or in any other framework are teams explicitly prohibited from engaging in such activities.

Informal learning just-in-time has its place as does structured, scheduled retrospection. It's not a case of choosing one in place of the other.

As this is my last article for 2021, I thought I'd share the top articles which I wrote this year from the three channels where I publish them.

• Wordpress: Trick or Treat - project management lessons from Halloween!
• LinkedIn: The PMBOK® Guide Seventh Edition - is the cup half full or half empty?
• Projectmanagement.com: Helping team members avoid the fears of working remotely

Happy holidays and see you in 2022!