Feedback Sharing and Continuous Improvement

End of the year is a good time for teams to reflect on the year that passed by and look for opportunities for improvement. In that regard, feedback exchange is a critical part of professional development. We all deserve feedback; it helps us perform better and ultimately succeed in our careers. For the last 4 years, I have been conducting this annual exercise that I had read about in one of the leadership forums and I wanted to give it a try. This feedback exchange approach is a simple way of capturing "Start, Stop & Continue" aspects of our day-to-day work. I must say, I have found this to be a very useful way of collecting and sharing feedback across teams, projects and individuals. This ultimately has resulted in better understanding and finding of common themes (processes, tools, practices etc.) that either need to be started afresh, or that need to be discontinued, or the ones that must be continued to add value to the overall delivery.

 To implement this approach - I follow the below 5 steps:

1. Seek feedback: Each person on the team shares feedback under the headings START, STOP, & CONTINUE. Each individual is expected to share a few things we must (as a team or individually) should START, STOP and CONTINUE doing.
2. Analyze feedback: I then collate responses and identify areas where we as a team need to focus on. I talk to the individuals if there are areas that require further information or clarification, or if I need to clarify few things. Points under each heading will then be aggregated to identify trends that we will work on for next year.
3. Review feedback with team: I then review the consolidated feedback with team (with names masked, as applicable) to agree on the common trends to Start, Stop & Continue.
4. Agree on action items: We then (as a team) agree on action items for team or individuals to follow through to closure.
5. Review progress: Depending on the action items and importance or priority, we then review the progress of the action items (mostly on a quarterly basis).

 Some of the themes that have been identified over the past few years are:

• Self learning & development in terms tools, technologies, & domain knowledge
• Increasing productivity or efficiency through further automation
• Better risk management
• Improvement to user acceptance testing process
• Prioritization of book of work
• Better engagement with stakeholders
• Knowledge sharing of best practices, achievements
• Ideas to implement stricter controls in terms of checklists, entry & exit criteria etc. for the overall test management
• Expanded use of the collaboration tools

Over the years, I have personally been glad to see a long list of 'Continue' items, which reflects the best practices followed by the group and the ones team believes in. It has also been encouraging to see a reasonable number of suggestions under 'Stop' & 'Start' as they reflect the due diligence and quest for continuous improvement. 

Note that this approach of feedback sharing is in addition to seeking feedback through lessons learned or retrospective approaches during project specific meetings. It is a group exercise for review & discussion but is to be done individually so each individual can think independently and provide feedback in isolation.

In general, it is a great tool that offers the following benefits:

• everyone is heard
• makes it safe to propose novel ideas
• helps give actionable feedback
• helps implement feedback from the team.

Posts are in a personal capacity only.