SharePoint Retreat London (part 3 of 3)
Part 3 – Going forward
Retrospective
For any activity I find the best way to improve is to review the positives and the negatives and then action the most important parts. Over the years of doing this I have found that a couple of techniques work very well – especially for new teams or groups that don’t normally work together.
Allow a set amount of time, for SPRetreat it was 30 minutes, and then ask the people present what were the positives and negatives about the event. The floor is open to any comments from the activities, organisation, people, location, food, value of the event etc. The idea is to capture everything, to have some discussion to clarifyand record the comments.
Every comment is valuable feedback, but like all good agile techniques deal with the most important things first. To get the most important things highlighted you ask the team to allocate their votes (each person gets 4 votes they can place against any comment). Allowing allocation of votes on the positive comments means you make sure these don’t change when you try to fix the negatives.
The feedback we got from the first event was
| Positives | Negatives |
| Full day Saturday | More enforcement on muscle memory techniques
|
| Varied solutions – perhaps need more devs
|
More input from presenters |
| Learning | Not able to improve code based on the problem set, not enough code in solution
|
| Enforced swapping of pairs
|
Not sure what to expect from the day |
| Time boxing and 5 x 1 hour session | Need prereqs before the event to help setup laptops
|
| Good way to understand and discuss SharePoint | Send out WSP to help setup things like data, templates
|
| Have two streams (or more) - Dev - Architect/Solution
|
No BBQ |
| Need to rerun the event to clarify feedback | London based << not ideal for everyone
|
| London based << good location to get to
|
|
| Venue << Wifi, coffee, water, space, air con
|
Actions
From the feedback the actions should be:
- Keep the event on Saturday and running for a full day
- Split the event and have more focused learning
- Keep people moving around at each session and keep them pairing
- Improve the communication about the event
- Provide more guidance and resources to help with setup
Going Forward
Based on the feedback above I will be working on the next SharePoint Retreat Events. Expect SharePoint retreats to become more regular and to spread out to other locations.
I have already had some offers of help in setting up future events; if you feel you would like to get involved – perhaps host your own SharePoint Retreat or would like to become a sponsor – please contact me via 21apps.
