This week is reading week. So on top of completing my reading, I will also be looking at the three activities below.
1) The first and most obvious activity is to do some reading. We all have that pile of books stacked up or a folder full of journal articles waiting, but with the best of intentions we have not had enough time to read them all yet. You could use this week to catch up on the reading and utilise the insight gained to inform your approach to the last half of the module. For this activity I caught up with the videos from week 4 and 5 since there quite a few on there, and I also decided to keep up with the reading on the book Search inside yourself by Chade-Meng Tan. When I heard about this book I decided to buy it as it sounded really insightful and offers a lot of advice for those seeking acceptance of themselves and with that, how it affects your own personal happiness.
2) As part of your assignment work, you were tasked with maintaining a critical reflective journal (CRJ). With the best will in the world, maintaining a journal and keeping up-to-date with reflective writing can be difficult. It is easy to get behind. Often, entries remain unfinished, unpublished or in note form. This is a good time to catch up with the journal, complete entries and tidy-up the taxonomy, so it is easy to navigate.
For this section of the activity, I decided to look back at my feedback from Jamie and the others from the cohort. There were some good pieces of advice so I have also been working on compartmentalising some of the entries and also giving clearer headings.
3) Now is also a great time to carry out an interim retrospective. According to Woodward et al. (2010), during the development lifecycle, it is extremely useful to stop at major milestones and perform self-analysis in the form of ‘reflection’ and ‘retrospectives’. We already mentioned reflection in reference to the CRJ; let’s take a moment to discuss what a retrospective is and how it can be used to support your personal development.
The retrospective is an event where in a team or as an individual, you look back on the previous period of development and assess how well it went in terms of performance. The main aim is to learn from past experience and to apply the lessons learned through reflection to inform the next development period. This activity can be carried out at the end of sprints, major milestones and at the end of a project. It is used to improve the performance of teams and individuals.
There are many ways to structure a retrospective meeting. Mike Cohn, one of the founders of the Scrum Alliance, suggests the “stop, start, and continue” methods for conducting a retrospective (2016). It is a simple approach that involves looking back over a period of development and thinking about how the process could adapt, based on your experiences. There are three main steps: you must consider what processes you should start doing within your practice, what you should stop doing and what you should continue to do.
With this activity it was quite important that I sit down and start looking back through my journal and look at what I have done. I started at week one and read through each section tidying up some of the structure in terms of placement. For example, there were multiple times I talked about the game jam in week 1 and then later also in the entry. Moving these around and making the entry read more naturally felt better and it was also good to look back on what I did during this time and reflect on what I could have done better. For week 1 specifically I felt my time management could have gone better and it was good to see that throughout the weeks, I had been making better progress. Then at week 5 (time and project management) you can tell it really resonated with me.
References: Flex.falmouth.ac.uk. 2021. Log in to canvas. [online] Available at: <https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/911/pages/week-6-reading-week-activities?module_item_id=49178> [Accessed 16 March 2021].
26th March 2021
During week 9, the communities of practice I came across the section on Belinda Waldock, and how she works with businesses to be more agile. I decided to come back to this section of the blog and update extra reading that I have been doing. Following the attached link took me to Amazon in which I purchased Belinda's book, "Being Agile in Business".
Since this is an area I am trying to improve on and work within my own community I thought the book would be very beneficial to me. I specifically like the section which covers how to organise workloads and different methods for different types of people, this in turn really helped me understand myself better.
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