Johannes Thönes

Software-Developer, ThoughtWorker, Permanent Journeyman, Ruby Enthusiast, Java and Devils Advocate.

My Personal Retrospective Plan for 2012

It is time for a personal retrospective, as the year 2012 comes to an end. I took some time on the train to plan my retrospective.

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So I’m sharing what I plan to do at the 2nd or 10th of January:

  • Intro Music: Listen to my retrospective song, to start the retrospective ritual.

  • Read Retrospective Letter: I write a letter to myself at the end of every longer retrospective. This time I’ll read the letters from 2011, Q1 2012 and the letter from the TWU retrospective.

  • Social Interaction Analysis

    • Queries: I’ll search in Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, E-Mail, Call-Log for some interesting patterns. I will prepare some statistics before the retrospective. In this step I’ll analyse those data.

    • Social MindMap: Integrate the insights gained from the queries into the a MindMap which should includes also the feedback I received directly from my peers.

  • Timeline

    • Enter Facts: Put the facts into a timeline to see the development over time. Data sources will be: Calendar, Heartbeat Retrospectives, other Retrospectives, Notes and my brain.

    • Color the timeline: green for positive feelings, red for negative feelings and blue for surprises. Which each color, try to find out, why this made me feel this way.

  • 5 Why’s: Select the three most important topics and ask why five times to find out the rood cause.

  • Decide what to do

    • Define goals: Define a limited set of main goals for next year.

    • Define measures: Find way to archieve these goals. Select the ones which I want to pursue. Reject some as well.

    • Select SMART-Objectives: For every measure find at least one SMART-Objectives so I can commit to it. The commitment itself happens in a heartbeat retrospective.

  • Heartbeat Retrospectives

    • Effectiveness: Think about, why heartbeat retrospective lost their effectiveness this year.

    • Time: Think about, why heartbeat retrospectives were not so regular this year?

    • Goal: Find means to make heartbeat retrospectives to support the goals I defined before.

    • Plan: Create a new plan and form for the heartbeat retrospective.

  • Write Retrospective Letter: Write a letter to yourself to be read before the next retrospective.

  • Outro Music: Listen to the outro music to close the retrospective.

That’s the plan for now. What do you think? Do you have any questions?

I plan to do an article on every item of this plan in the first 6 month of the next year. So if you are interested, stay tuned.