Some people call them postmortems; others call them debriefings; I call them personal improvement sessions. I am just wrapping up a project that has had a very aggressive timeline. I'll be able to announce the project in two weeks when the new website goes live. Here are some of the PM/technical details:
- Background
- We partnered with a design firm. They give us PDF's and jpg's and we make pages within Sitefinity
- The design firm has corporationX as a client but three way, day-to-day interaction takes place between my company, the design firm, and corporationX
- CorporationX is responsible for all back-end/business functionality and will expose that functionality through web services
- The site must be content managed (Sitefinity)
- The development team (at my company) consists of 4 developers and me as a part-time PM. (1 sr. developer, 2 jr. developers, and 1 new grad)
- The entire site (160 pages) have to be developed in 9 weeks
- Technical
- The site is JavaScript/Ajax intensive
- Sitefinity is the content management solution
- .Net web services are provided by corporationX
- JSON is the data format between the UI and the web service
- Work Item control, reporting, development team collaboration, builds, and source control are handled via TFS
Now to make a long story short, we delivered 8 minutes late on a 9 week project. That's not even a real number because abut 2/3rd of the way through a change request for 1 extra week of work went through and we delivered that with the final result. If you consider that, we delivered 8 minutes shy of a week early. I am extremely proud of my team and what they accomplished. I look forward to sharing the end result with you in two weeks.
Now, the point of this blog post is about the final discussion as a team. My focus for the past few months is self improvement. I am trying to become a better developer, better employee, and better husband. I am assuming that these are not mutually exclusive. :) I wanted to force my focus on my team and see how it worked so here is my little experiment. I gave my team 5 days notice that we were going to gather as a team and identify things we liked/disliked about the project and about each other. Then after the project ended (litterally 8 minutes after it ended) I gathered the entire team (developers and me only) into a room and we started the discussion with the rules:
- What is said in this room is never spoken again
- What is said in this room is to improve ourselves
- No one has hurt feelings regardless of what is said in this room
- Keep joking to a minimum
- Everyone has to be Honest
- No one gets interrupted when it's their turn to speak
- No management in the room
The first topic for this discussion was the interaction with the design firm and corporationX. Unfortunately due to the rules I made, I can't give specific examples but I hope to give an idea of how you can utilize this idea in the future. We each, one at a time, identified at least one thing we enjoyed about working with both the design firm and corporationX and then one thing we wish we could have changed. This was a great ice-breaker for the next discussion. Some very valuable feedback about my PM style and process was presented with this first part and I will certainly take the comments seriously and improve myself.
The next topic was potentially the most difficult. Each of us had to face the another team member and tell them to their face what we liked and what we didn't like about how they operated/developed/conducted themselves throughout the project. It was hard to tell someone that you just spent the last 9 weeks becoming friends with that you didn't like <something about how they worked/>. We were all afraid of harming relationships. Some comments were made that truly changed the way I thought about myself and how I worked. This is EXACTLY what I was hoping for. The feedback on this process was fantastic and I will surely implement this idea on future projects.