New year, new resolutions. The changing of the year brings about a perfect opportunity to reflect on the previous, and promise to do all the things you said you would do…as well as some more on top.
With busy lives, it’s no surprise that most of us don’t achieve our resolutions or even remember we were meant to be changing things in our lives until the next December comes around and prompts us to do it all again.
At We Are Potential, we are committed to learning and try to embed this in our processes and practices. As a fun exercise, we looked at setting some 2020 New Year resolutions for the organisation to help us improve the services and products we deliver, but also as a way of checking in with our mission and strategic objectives we had been developing in 2019.
Being used to thinking about and providing innovative solutions, we couldn’t simply just write a list of resolutions. There had to be a methodology. Like most technology based organisations, we use the Agile project management methodology in lots of areas of our work; developing work iteratively in short bursts of activity (a “sprint”), reflecting, adjusting/planning then moving on to the next iteration.
At the end of each sprint, all stakeholders come together, in a “sprint retrospective”, to reflect on how we have worked together and how we can improve. One way to structure a sprint retrospective is to use the Start / Stop / Continue method, where the team is brought together to consider, for the next bit of work, what we should start doing, what we should stop doing, and what we should continue to do. (It’s not complicated!).
So:
Start focuses on the exciting new things you can embark on (though could mean you have to stop other things)
Stop highlights the blockers or things/methods that haven’t worked
Continue demonstrates what has worked well, what you are best at and highlights the positives
It is a great, simple and structured way to reflect and I wondered whether this year, we could combine the agile retrospective idea to the last year and the organisation’s plans for the next…so here are We Are Potential’s 2020 resolutions – in retrospective form!
We Are Potential will Start…
Working more with Unusual Suspects
We love collaborating with everyone we work with, but there are always opportunities outside of our networks and our comfort zone. We can use our talents more widely and create more diverse impact if we find new organisations, doing different things in different sectors.
To make something and give it away for free
We are never secretive or precious about the technology we develop, where possible open sourcing our code. But we want to explicitly make something that people can use beyond the projects we are working on.
It could be a repository integration tool or a project website for a small NGO. If anyone has any ideas or urgent needs, do contact us and we can have a conversation.
We Are Potential will Stop…
Mission Critical or Critical to our mission
We don’t have many currently on our books, but we will stop working with people, organisations and projects that do not share our mission. We strongly believe in an equitable world and in 2020 aim to work with organisations that really believe in this too.
We Are Potential will Continue…
To learn about how to measure our impact
In 2019, we embarked on a process of developing a monitoring, evaluation and learning framework for the work we do. We will continue to work on this as it is so integral to our mission.
There, we’ve said them. We have to deliver now. So now, we’re working on the details (we want them to be SMART, right?), and will update you on how we are getting along.
….now, where did I put that flyer on reduced gym membership?