When taking negative feedback (any feedback) in this perspective I find it easy to detach the person from the feedback and focus on the faults in the process.

Just my 2 pennies on this subject. Let me know what your ideas are around this matter.

–Hubert

While I am saying there’s not much of a place for ‘negative feedback’ in the project setting, the more important point is to make ‘assessing’ part of the everyday practices and reponsibilities of all team members. The sharing and exploring of assessments about the project provides the means for guiding and redirecting the project. The more people involved the better.

The usual understanding of project controls, as separted from the functions of planning and execution, is to provide a ‘truing’ function to keep a project on plan. I suggest this detached after-the-fact approach doesn’t work. And we still need to keep our attention on the goal/promise of the project.

The future of project controls is to place the responsibility for gauging where we are and how we are doing at every moment with the people who are executing the project. No separation of execution and control. (for that matter, no separation with planning either) Control happens in recurrent practices of assessing the project. On Scrum projects team members do their assessing in the daily scrum and in their pair programming sessions. On Last Planner projects the assessing happens in the weekly planning conversations with work group leaders. It takes acts of design by the leader and the team to establish and then conduct themselves in this manner.

There’s no arguing with results on this one. Both Scrum and Last Planner projects show good results and participants report they enjoy working in this manner.