Reflection and Revising

Reflect on the past year. Revise your practice accordingly.

This is a good personal practice. But it’s also a good organizational practice. 

Unfortunately, organizations can get caught up in formal trickled-down objectives, documentation, and tools. That distracts them from the purpose of the objectives all-together. Quite frankly, its hard (and possibly unfair) to trickle down a business objective to an individual contributor in development or QA.

So instead, the best organizations don’t try to fit square pegs into round holes. They ask different questions of themselves and their people. Regardless of the formal process. 

What went well? What didn’t?
Where were we trying to go? Where are we going?
What helped us? What hurt us?
What do we know now that we didn’t know then?
What have we learned? What do we need to learn?
Do we have the right people? How do we hire the right people?
Are we worldclass? How do we become worldclass? 

Reflect and revise.