2008 Retrospective – Our Year Remembered
This year we made a point of making time to reflect on things, not just at the end of the year, but all the way through it. At the End of a project, the End of a quarter, sometimes even the end of a conversation. We adopted a new routine of hosting Clearinghouse meetings to reflect on how we are functioning on a team. And we continued validating our past efforts and identifying new goals through our quarterly meetings, governed by the Rockefeller Habits. We dedicated ourselves to project retrospectives, rather than calling them post-mortems. Always the goal being to improve. So naturally, the year would not be complete with a 2008 retrospective. To reflect on what can be improved, and more importantly, to celebrate our successes and blessings!
We experienced what could best be described as an illuminating and transformational year at 2Paths. From changes to our processes and tools to the diversification of our team demographic, to teaming up with some fabulous new valued partners and clients, change abounded. And there’s not a soul among us who would argue that it wasn’t for the better. As our year concludes, my 2008 retrospective blog finds no shortage of things to reminisce about. Sit back and enjoy.
From a people perspective, the team welcomed 2 new babies into our extended family. Congratulations to Michal and Lori on the birth of baby Cohen, and congratulations to Ricky and Lin on their second addition to the family, Lucas. I personally bought a house and got married to the love of my life, Willy the caveman, in a small Whistler wedding. Garret married the love of his life, the beautiful Priscille, in grand fashion Winnipeg-style. 2Paths gladly welcomed new members to the team Omar Khan, Sandra Widjaja, Gary Meehan, Tim Oxenford, and. Kari Braaten. And last, and very important – we celebrated Michal Urbanski’s 5-year anniversary with the company by sending him on kite-board lessons in Squamish. He returned exhilarted and intact, thank goodness.
Processes and tools were areas that 2Paths focused heavily on in 2008, recognizing that these will differentiate us from our competition in the future. We honed in on our existing skills by cultivating 3 certified scrum-masters (Lorill, Geoff and Omar). Scrum (a brief daily morning developer meeting) has been pivotal to our successful software projects. Someone likened it to inviting your mother-in-law to live with you – she may not fix everything, but she will most certainly point our everything that needs to be fixed. Then it’s just about the fixing. Next, the team continued to examine open source software tools and added some more to our repertoire, including Grails, Hudson, and Groovy, to name a few. To ensure we got the latest on emerging technologies and uses of technologies, we also sent 2Pathsians to attend conferences on Geo-spatial technology, the Semantic Web, QCon (a conference of technical depth and enterprise focus), No Fluff Just Stuff, and Agile Methodologies.
In the spring, we moved our office to the Arthur Erikson Waterfall building by Granville Island from Gastown. In addition to loving the view, we have been enjoying lunch at Go Fish, the NoodleBox, and Sushi Go, not to mention whipping up concoctions in our gourmet kitchen. After our first pay cheque in the new location, our Synesso Cyncra coffee machine made its proud appearance in our kitchen providing java nirvana for everyone to enjoy. There has been talk of a group membership to Caffeine Anonymous, but so far we’ve been holding out alright.
From a team-building perspective, we did a TON of fun things together this year. Our long-standing tradition of playing together, letting off some steam, and laughing is our real secret to strong teamwork. Here’s the illustrious list of our 2008 fun:
- We bonded over some spring-skiing/riding at Grouse mountain, followed by beer on the patio in the glorious sun;
- We learned to Curl at Marpole Curling;
- We tested our trust in each other during rock-climbing;
- We golfed at Gleneagles and BBQed at Judi’s new home;
- We enjoyed some fine-dining at Chambar;
- We participated in Bike to Work week
- We enlisted a yoga instructor to lead us through weekly hatha yoga practices on the new roof-top patio in the summer, and in our boardroom in the winter.
One of our major projects has been with the “Insert name of international organization which we will shortly be revealing” on an application that has global impact and countless social good benefits. It gave us an opportunity to go globetrotting to the likes of Paris and London. Better yet, it presented a chance to work in concert with partners, Gagan Diesh and Kaaren Schulz of DesignStamp, http://www.designstamp.com/,whom we’ve grown to love and cannot do without. We were also glad to continue our solid working relationship with our valued client, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/en. And, we played pretend, and acted like a client to ourselves, dictating our own requirements towards an internal initiative which we will may be talking about a lot more in 2009.
So, as you can see we have been very busy this year. Not just building web applications that make complicated problems palatable and bite-size, but also in being good to ourselves and to each other. And we look forward to an exciting 2009, filled with market improvements, more work with our valued partners and clients, and at the very least, some good conversations, hopefully with you, over a fancy-pants coffee from our cool espresso machine. Have a safe and happy holiday season, everyone!
2Paths Team
