About Personal Retrospectives
A personal retrospective is a regularly practiced ritual, during which you take time and think about yourself. You reflect on what happened and what is currently happening in your life. You try to learn from these experiences and derive new goals and insights for yourself.
To do a personal retrospective you typically have a set of exercises you do. These exercises help you to find the information and extract knowledge and understanding from them.
About the Series
I practice personal retrospectives since January 2010. I share my personal experience with the technique in this series.
I want to write circa 10 articles about personal retrospectives this year. Let’s see how far I can get.
If you want to follow the series, but not the rest of the blog, you can use the special category RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JthoenesPersonalRetrospectives
Articles of the Series
- Personal Retrospectives – An Introduction
- 5 Phases of a Personal Retrospective
- Prime Directive of a Personal Retrospective
- Creating a Ritual for a Personal Retrospective
- How to do your own Personal Retrospective?
- When to do a Personal Retrospective?
- My Personal Retrospective Plan for 2012
Further Material
My knowledge about retrospectives I derived (not exclusively) from the following resources:
- Kerth NL. Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
The standard book for retrospectives. I is written for people facilitating retrospectives, but it serves as a good introduction for anyone who is interested in the topic as well. - Derby E and Larsen D. Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Retrospectives are an important part of every agile process. This book is more about retrospectives in the context of agile. I haven’t got around to read this book yet. But I will read the book on the side while creating this series. - The Agile Retrospectives Resources Wiki (link)
The Agile Retrospectives Resources Wiki with proposals for exercises to do in project retrospectives. - SE Radio Episode 105: Retrospectives with Linda Rising (link)
An interview podcast episode were Linda Rising presents the concept of retrospectives and a few retrospective exercise. This interview was very energizing for me – it brought me to the topic of retrospectives. Thanks Markus and Linda – you did a great job! - Personal Retrospective: Self-Acquintance and Agility by A. Nies (link)
A presentation recorded at InfoQ 2010 in San Francisco. The presentation shows a lot about personal retrospectives and retrospective in general. Especially the psychological aspect was very interesting to me.