I’ve just come back off holiday with the missus and 3 kids. It ended up being a fanastic break, but started off as a right old howler! The middle kid, India, can be nightmare and morphed into a some demonic, adult munching, seven legged monster on day one of the holiday. That same night the missus and I discussed the issues and formulated plans to improve the situation. Day two was an improvement and again that night we revised our plans. Day three was even better and so on and so forth. Happy holidays…

When I got back from holiday it suddenly dawned on me that I was applying the stuff that I do when running software projects to my homelife. Sad, but true! There are many different names for this (not my sadness), but I like the term used within Crystal Clear - Reflective Improvement. It you think of the holiday as a release, then each day was an iteration within that release. Intra-day we were doing Reactive Improvement, bascially dealing with issues as and when they arose. Inter-day, we were doing Reflective Improvement.

You need a heathly dose of both reactive and reflective improvement. With reactive improvement, you are making tactical adjustments within an iteration to steer it to a successful conclusion. However, tactical adjustments are not as effective unless they are made within the context a strategy. The strategy defines objectives and success criteria, however formal or informal you wish to make them. Moreover, the strategy needs to be made outside of an iteration so that the team can discuss the issues as if looking down on the battlefield from the highest mountain, rather from in the frontline trenches.

The sad truth is that the majority of software projects I’ve encountered, I may be unlucky, deal purely in the reactive improvement and reflect only once as an post-project post mortem exercise. What the hell use is that? If I had I done that on holiday, India would surely have completely devoured by left big toe, and heaven knows what next.  But don’t worry, I’m fine…