We are launching a new weekly blog series – Inside Revelation.  Inside Revelation is one way we can share who we are with our customers and partners. While we are experts at developing online qualitative software solutions designed to make the life of Market Researchers easier, we also have domain experts whose expertise contributes to the overall culture that is Revelation.  In order to share some of that domain expertise we are launching a new series of blog posts called ‘Inside Revelation’.  We are kicking off the weekly posts with Revelation’s CTO Dan Herrera.  Dan is an agile development guru and a great leader.  One of the first things I noticed about Dan is his innate ability to lead and inspire his team and peers.

Check out his blog post below to learn what inspires him and how he utilizes specific activities to improve processes.

Thanks! Revelation Marketing

Inside Revelation: People, Processes and Tools  

I feel that one of the great things we do to ensure our development process at Revelation is continually evolving and improving is to review and refine our processes. It is my belief that all good disciplines are built around people, processes and tools.  And, by incorporating people in the review of processes and tools we can help the company learn and grow --ultimately providing our users with a better customer experience.

One of the activities that I use within Revelation Labs, Revelation’s development organization, is called a retrospective.  Basically, a retrospective is what sounds like – a review of the past.  A retrospective is an activity designed to help us improve our processes and tools by reviewing what worked and did not work in a certain time period.  Retrospectives can help any organization or group focus on improving processes and tools at every level of a company. 

Retrospectives as a way to gain insight into your organization

A retrospective is a gathering of all people in a department or cross-functional team to discuss what went well, and what didn't go well during the last week, month or quarter. I take a lot of my inspiration from some exercises that are discussed in James Shore's fabulous book 'The Art of Agile Development'.  Here is a link to the chapter about retrospectives, which he has generously posted for free on the web at http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/retrospectives.html 

James first suggests that as the facilitator of the retrospective, you set expectations for everyone by explaining that the purpose of this exercise isn't to assign blame.   He begins a retrospective by reciting the 'Prime Directive':  "Regardless of what we discover today, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."  It's important (especially the first time you hold a retrospective), to facilitate a progressive conversation. 

Revelation Example

One of the exercises we use during our retrospectives is ‘Mute Mapping’.  I have found this exercise to be especially effective.  Mute mapping begins by brainstorming a list of issues that fall into a few categories: 'Enjoyable', 'Frustrating', 'Puzzling', 'Same', 'More', 'Less'.  Participants in the retrospective take an index card and write down an issue that falls into one of these categories.  

As an example, from one of our retrospectives in development, someone wrote down "JavaScript Testing".  This was a frustration for my team, since the tools that we had at the time were not providing us with the type of testing coverage we felt we needed.

Mute mapping continues with an exercise where you as the facilitator invite everyone to start moving index cards around (we do this on a big conference table) according to three rules:

    1. Put related cards together

    2. Put unrelated cards far apart

    3. No talking

Once everyone is finished, you should have some well-defined groups of cards.  The next task is to name the category that these groups represent.  Read a few of the cards and ask for suggested categories. 

When you have your list of categories of cards, it's time to ask everyone to vote on the category they'd most like to improve for the next iteration/week/month/quarter.  When you have your objective for process improvement that your team has come up with, you'd be surprised as to how effective everyone will be at tackling the issue.  At the end of our retrospective, we decided to stop using the current testing tools we were using and find new tools for testing JavaScript. 

These exercises provide a productive tool to involve people in improving processes across departments and organizations.  I hope that this has been helpful; I have had people in our company tell me that they really enjoyed participating in the mute mapping exercise, so have fun with it!