It is time once again for our Thanksgiving special. Yes, it is that time of year when we pause and reflect a bit on how to prepare for your retrospective. This year, we will start the week with an admonition to assess the year gone by. We are dwindling down to the end of 2023 and now is the best time to review what we accomplished during that span of time.

Thankful For A Retrospective?

You may ask why we would use the week of Thanksgiving to talk about how to prepare for your retrospective of the year. It comes down to one thing, Holidays and travelling are perfect for such times. We have some time where we can allow our mind to drift a bit while going over the year gone by. That is an excellent way to address the hard facts of what was accomplished while dreaming (as it were) about what we can do better in the year ahead. This is an activity that requires a little freedom of thought rather than a hard list of bullet points to asddress.

Look Back To Look Forward

Retrospectives have a lot of benefits. However, we need to give them the proper respect to get that value out of them. That includes spending time thinking about how things could have gone differently. Thus, we assume you will do an annual retrospective as part of planning for the year ahead. It is far more difficult to create a plan from scratch tan it is to build on one we have already executed. That holds true even when we had obstacles and failures as part of our prior execution.

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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