Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Get constant personal feedback...

Agile is about constant feedback loops. Release, iteration, daily scrum, pair programming, unit tests... they all provide feedback.

How are you getting feedback on yourself? Are you doing a good job? Do you communicate well? Do your team mates like working with you? Is there anything you can improve?

Something I took away from Agile 2008 is that regular personal feedback (weekly) is much more impacting than a yearly or quarterly review. This is why I've started using Rypple. After every presentation, I send it out to the attendees. I've sent it out to solicit peer feedback to support my self-review with my manager at the end of the year.

I tried something like this before using index cards and received good results, but this platform makes it so much less time consuming.

Try it... it might help you also. Check the site out and watch the quick video for more info.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Kev,

    For once I've got something to add to your great blog. It's the self inspecting part of personal feedback – not opposed to, but complementing feedback from others.

    I'm doing two things in the end of every working day:

    1) Daily Mind Map ( described here: http://blog.staffannoteberg.com/daily-mind-map ) is an intuitive gathering of this days conclusions, associations and experiences. It also gives me an artifact to use for repetition a month later.

    2) Pomodoro Technique (described here: http://blog.staffannoteberg.com/pomodoro-technique-in-5-minutes ) is a time management method with many agile practices, but on a personal level. One of these practices is that you end the working day by interpreting personal process metrics tracked during the day. This gives you an idea of how to reshape your process for tomorrows work.

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  2. Staffan-

    Thanks for the added feedback! I've heard of both but haven't investigated them enough to try them myself yet. Now maybe I will.

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  3. Hi Staffan,

    Thanks for the tips. I hadn't heard of these but it sounds really cool!

    Kevin,

    Thanks for the Rypple mention (I'm one of the guys behind Rypple). I hope you're finding it useful. Feel free to reach out to us anytime if you need anything.

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