One of the things that frustrate me is when we make the same mistakes over and over again.
This is why my team created a Google Doc that we call “Better Next Year”.
After major events like the first day of school, testing, planned outages, semester, etc. my team debriefs using this document.
In the document, we reflect on three simple questions.
What was succesful?
What annoyed us?
How do we make it better?
We then record our answers in the document. We also refer to these conversations as “Vegas” conversations. What is said there….stays there. This helps us be honest with each other.
Our goal then is at the end of the year to use this document to iterate our systems, create new documentation, and avoid repeating the same mistakes.