Annual Pizza Meeting

The Technology Team APM1 is held close to the beginning of each calendar year, and includes all members of the Technology Team. It has five goals:

  • Reviewing the past year; what went well, what went badly and what we could do better
  • Looking at what we’ve got in progress
  • Planning for the future and sharing our ideas
  • An open forum for any other issues within the team
  • A chance for the team to celebrate together with food and drink

Structure

Review

Review the past year, using a The Good, The Bad and The Ugly retrospective as a starting point. Remember that the purpose of this review is to be honest with ourselves, and although that might be hard at times we will be better because of it.

Prime Directive

The Technology Team uses a ‘no-blame’ review process, where no matter how badly things might have gone wrong we never seek to pin blame on any individual. This is encompassed in the Retrospective Prime Directive:

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

— Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

The Good

“Good” things went as planned, and we should try to do more of them and replicate the reasons for their success.

The Bad

“Bad” things are those which shouldn’t have happened in the first place, or which went so wrong that they had a significant negative impact. We should always learn from bad things, and mitigate against them in future.

The Ugly

“Ugly” things are those which work, but which could be done better. Left unaddressed these are likely to lead to significant problems in future and pose an operational or reputational risk to the Church.

Future Plans

Put together a list of things the Technology Team would like to see accomplished in the next year. This should be realistically achievable given the Team’s awareness of current capacity, ongoing projects and finances, but this is not a list of targets which must be met.

  1. Annual Pizza Meeting, a play on Annual Parish Meeting ↩