Inspect and Adapt Yourself Through Personal Retrospectives
Using Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation to become a high performing individual
As Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters, a large part of our job is teaching teams about Scrum Events and the value of each one. Each of these events helps to support the Scrum Pillars of Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation. In addition, they help keep the feedback loops that are necessary for an empirical process like Scrum to work.
We can take these lessons and apply them to our personal lives. So let’s start with the Retrospective.
The Scrum Guide says the reason for the Retrospective is to “…increase quality and effectiveness.”
In our personal lives, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities that we don’t stop and reflect on the progress we have been making and how we can continue to grow and improve. What would you say to your Scrum team if they decided to skip the Retrospective because they had too much work to do? You would probably say something about the idea that our goal isn’t to go as fast as possible but to make sure we are going in the right direction in the right way.
How long are your Personal Sprints?
Having a one-week sprint is an excellent way to keep track of the events in life while making each Sprint meaningful. Like the Scrum teams we work with, having shorter sprints means more opportunities to inspect and adapt. The one-week Sprint might not work for the cadence of your life, so experiment if it doesn’t feel like it is working for you.
For a personal retrospective, you can take a variety of approaches.
For a Scrum team, we would start by looking at their Commitments and Metrics from the Sprint that they just finished. We would also review the Sprint Goal to see if the team had achieved it. Did the team need to adapt the Sprint Backlog to reach the Sprint Goal? Were there any impediments they encountered along the way that we can learn from? Did we meet our continuous improvement goal?
For your Personal Retrospective, try to identify the things in your life that have the same intent. What can you do that will make your life or your personal growth more Transparent, Inspectable, and Adaptable? Are there any individual metrics you track — weight, days going to the gym, or time spent learning? These can be your starting point.
Did you set a Personal Sprint Goal? Is there something that you want to work toward throughout the week?
Do you use a personal task management system like Trello, Todoist, or Apple Reminders? Looking at what you completed during the week can also be good information to support your Retrospective, as can what you didn’t complete.
If you have worked with Scrum teams, you have probably used or seen a burn-down chart. Throughout the Sprint, this gets updated and can provide some signals for the team to judge their progress. However, unless you assign effort to your daily tasks, you will not have a personal burn-down chart. What you can have instead is a daily journal. Taking the time each evening to make some notes about the day gives you a snapshot of how things went for that day.
If you don’t create any reference material for yourself, you will not accurately be able to review the events and activities of the week. You might think you would remember it well enough, but ask yourself why we have the charts and metrics for the teams? It is easy to feel that you are making progress, but having a visual reference can prove the improvements or lack of progress.
Set your upcoming Sprint Goal
After reviewing the journals, metrics, and tasks from the closing week, now it is time to start looking ahead. When we work with teams, the output of our retrospectives is to have actionable continuous improvement items to work on during the next Sprint. Without that continuous improvement item, we have left out the practical part that helps our teams to get better.
Look at the information you reviewed and ask yourself what would make the upcoming week successful? What do you need to do differently to make improvements? What is one small change or experiment you can try out during the upcoming week?
Take this continuous improvement item and use it to create your Sprint Goal. For the week ahead, what are you trying to achieve? What goal can you set now to look back at and measure success or growth?
For example, when I wrote this, I had three articles in draft and nothing yet in the editing stage. My Sprint Goal is to get a post ready to publish. My continuous improvement experiment is writing before work each day. I haven’t had a dedicated time for writing, so I created this as an experiment for this week during my Retrospective. Will setting aside time to work on writing and editing each morning work for me? I’ll find out when I inspect my progress during my next Retrospective.
Our lives fly by so fast that we often find ourselves letting life happen to us instead of trying to decide how we want our lives to be. Taking the time to help craft the life you want and enjoy living can be a great experience. Significant changes will not happen overnight or after a single Retrospective. But those small changes you can build upon each other to allow you to piece by piece add in the things you want and need to have the life you deserve.
First published in Serious Scrum on Medium.com