Monthly Reviews – lessons from September

First Tuesday of every month, is a review day for us at Magnet. We meet individual teams, discuss about the previous month and set out goals for the current month. It was quite interesting this time.

• We completed one month in the new office! But it feels it’s been much more! So many things happened in the last month!
• Had problems initially with the new systems setup, still facing some problems in Internet connectivity, no audio on the thin clients etc.
• People have now adjusted to the changed office location, timings and the culture.
• We are more than 80 people now and it takes me a whole day to catch up with each developer and see what they are doing!
• We did some wonderful work in September. It was unofficially the AJAX month! Almost all projects had some or the other AJAX in them!
• We lost one RIA project, faced difficulties on a few others – but at the end of it, we made customers happy! And learnt a lot in the process!
• There is some neat work going on in different teams – new age, web 2.0 style, futuristic!
• People have started following simplicity and usability principles! The training we did in the earlier two months is paying off now!
• All projects were QA’ed this month! Considering the hectic schedules, that’s quite an achievement!
• The new team is excited. Everyone mentioned they learnt a lot, appreciated their mentors.
• The seniors said they did not learn much in the month. But then we could come up with a good long list of things 😉
• We talked about fixing broken windows! A principle from the Pragmatic Programmer book that advises to fix any holes in the application as soon as possible. Because if we don’t it leads to new holes coming up everywhere.
• People also said that pair programming is helping them.
• And planning too – people who spent half an hour at the start of the day to plan the tasks, could do things better.
• We came up with the idea of making individual targets for October public. So now we have a full list of targets (with dates and times) for everybody on a board in our main dev area. Anyone from the team can check up with another and support them in achieving their goals. But they need to be achieved!
• Spending an additional hour everyday on training, improved efficiencies for the RIA team greatly.

Looks like October is going to be even better!