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Everyone has their own style of keeping on top of things and a former workmate told me about the way one of his team members organised his information that I thought might be useful for people. I haven’t given it a go yet but I should definitely try it out.

1. Everything that he thought useful, he would write in a small text file and save it away.
2. Using google desktop, he could search for the information whenever he needed it.

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Having new people join the team always brings great insight, even if they are kind enough to come onto the project not firing criticisms immediately. When introducing them to a new codebase, I find it’s important to listen for yourself as you’re showing them for key phrases such as ideally we would have, I’m not particularly proud of, I have no idea why this is here, or this is a work-around.

Circumstances change and constraints in the past may no longer apply. All of this means you can continue to refactor the codebase to be clearer and easier to maintain. It may not mean you can fix things straight away but at least you know which parts you can improve on.

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I’ve had a few days pass since getting back from the Retrospective Facilitators Gathering and since I’ve been working on a new project haven’t had much time to reflect on the last half of the conference.

Here’s a condensed summary of notes I took:

• Four and a half days of an open space conference is extremely exhausting, especially in the desert. I think it’s a great way of running the conference and since I am who I am, I feel like I need to attend all the interesting sessions (of which there was plenty) and contribute or take out a lot of it. I’m very glad the organisers planned a small break at the end of Wednesday afternoon to help relieve some of this pressure.
• A retrospective facilitator’s toolkit can be minimal and at another end of the spectrum could easily fill an entire small suitcase with equipment that looks like an arts and craft or stationary store. Many that we listed include various types of tapes, various types and sizes of post-its, papers, cards, thinking toys, focus tools, food, tissue paper, pens, pencils, markers, dry erase, pins, hand cleaner, timers, and dots.
• Open space events help people solve specific problems. One I attended that seems particularly relevant to me and many people I know was called “Avoiding Burnout (How to be energised by your passion and not drained by it)”.

• Linda Rising’s quote: “You don’t get the thermometer out if you’re not sick”.
• Even people in the retrospective community make mistakes but are amazingly quick at reflecting, applying themselves and learning from it. It’s a community that really eat’s their own dog food (and this is a good thing – follow the link if you don’t believe me).
• Norm had a great story about how retrospectives and wisdom from their retrospectives are leveraged in the US Fire Fighting system. I found it fascinating how teams fighting fires hold reflections on how to improve their firefighting abilities while the US Fire Fighting Academy takes all those reflections, writes about them in journals, magazines and reports, teaches their students about the lessons learned from mistakes in the field, and lobby the government to influence and improve fire fighting standards.

I’ll get around to posting a final book list here sometime soon.

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Thank you for responding to the issue that I raised (located here) about a problem how one of your ASP.Net 2.0 Framework controls and Internet Explorer (and only Internet Explorer) fail to work well together.

I’m very happy that the time that I spent detailing the steps to reproduce the problem was well spent and that, you too, were able to reproduce it. I’m quite disappointed that we have not made any progress on fixing the problem and the solution offered to me was to submit the same issue but against a different product group. Unfortunately it looks like that avenue is currently closed (see Internet Explorer feedback site)

As someone who has spent time giving you feedback that I feel will help make your overall product better, I find it a little shocking that you ask for me to commit even more time even though I do not feel like we have made any more progress to fixing the problem. I can understand your desire to ensure issues are properly classified so the appropriate team may address it, but I feel I do not need to be involved with your company’s strategy at issue resolution since I feel you have all the information you need.

I appreciate your constant correspondence to my submitted issue, but I think I would have had a much better experience had the person who closed my issue, reclassified, or even duplicated the issue for the correct team to ensure that continued progress is made on the issue. I don’t understand why I need to spend additional time iterating the same information I have already provided your company with.

I am happy to discuss more of my experience submitting feedback and my own personal thoughts on how the user experience could be better. I do encourage you to contact me (emailpat “at” thekua.com) as I will be happy to share more of my thoughts to help improve the experience.

Yours truly,

Patrick Kua

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So it’s at the end of the second day that I’m writing about my experiences at the Retrospective Gathering. I hope that this entry not only helps me to distil my thoughts, realisations, affirmations and respect for different opinions but I hope it helps other people understand what retrospectives are, how important they can be and why there is an entire conference dedicated to it.

I’ve attended and participated in several conferences in the past, and the gathering I’ve been part of two days so far feels very different to others I’ve attended. Perhaps part of it has to do with the size (26 or so people), or perhaps it has to do with a group of people sharing a common passion helping each other to learn and grow. Either way, I feel it doesn’t matter that you’ve published (or not published) any books, it doesn’t matter the number of times that you’ve attended, and it doesn’t matter how you choose to participate, as it feels like a safe environment to share experiences and push each other’s learning comfort zone.

We are running this particular gathering using open space rules and despite the small number of participants we get quite a few different streams of so many different topics. I will post a link to the area where we are currently collating results.

For me, even after only the second day, it has be a phenomenal learning experience. Despite everyone’s passions for the same thing, I’m fascinated how so many people found the role of retrospective facilitation through so many different paths. I think I’ve already come away with plenty of learnings that I will try to distil (so far) in the list below:

• Training and coaching other retrospective facilitators actually requires lots of thought and preparation – sometimes people aren’t or will never be completely suitable for running them but it doesn’t mean they can’t contribute to a valuable session with other facilitators.
• Despite my passion for the topics, I don’t think I’ve personally spent enough time promoting or encouraging retrospectives (or what I prefer to classify as continuous improvement at a company, team or individual level) in my company enough and I definitely will try more to when I get back.
• I learned a heck a lot more about Temperature Readings and I think I’ve addressed a lot of my fears and concerns about not using it inappropriately.
• Facilitating distributed retrospectives brings about a whole heap of its own obstacles and it’s good to have contributed to developing a toolkit for dealing with it.
• Gut feel plays an important part of the way facilitators seem to make decisions – though best practices may exist, judgement about when things are used and not used is more important than sticking to “best practices”.

There’s some really interesting resources I’ve accumulated so far, and at the end I will certainly ensure the list is put in one place, but here’s some of the items I’ve got to look into right now:

• Diffusion of Innovation
• Non Violent Communication
• The Elegant solution
• Innovation Games
• Corporate Cultural Survival Group
• Managing at the speed of Change
• Naming the Elephant
• Focused Questions
• New People Making
• Fearless Change

As always if you have managed to get this far, I would enjoy hearing your feedback, thoughts, opinions and questions on anything I’ve written about so far.

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