My Personal 2021 Review and Retrospective

Dave Borzillo
2 min readDec 28, 2021

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Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

In agile, specifically scrum, at the end of your time developing the team has a sprint review followed by a retrospective.

So I’ll present I am a team of one and the time box was for all of 2021 (which is not what Scrum Guide recommends).

From the Scrum Guide on a Sprint Review:

During the event, the Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished in the Sprint and what has changed in their environment. Based on this information, attendees collaborate on what to do next.

My goal for 2021 was to become a better agile coach and become a trainer so I can make a difference in teams I help.

What did I accomplish in 2021?

  • Trained over 300 people on the basics of agile and scrum
  • Co-trained classes to help people withe obtaining Registered Scrum Master™ (about 50 people) and Registered Product Owner™ (also about 50 people)
  • Co-trained my first Scrum@Scale course
  • Officially became a Registered Scrum Trainer™ and Registered Scrum@Scale Trainer™
  • Helped implement a large scaled agile project

So while the items above do meet my goal I ask myself, “So what?”. How did all that help the teams I train and coach make a difference?

For the large program I helped to implement Scrum@Scale they won an Engineering Innovation award. For other teams I helped them start to execute scrum and work with their management to understand how best to support them. Overall, teams delivered which is important according the agile principles. While I work for a large corporation I can’t point to specific increase revenue or customer satisfaction, I do believe that helping propagate “good scrum” has set the foundation for sustainable agile.

It is very important that I could not and did not do all this by myself. I am very grateful for a group of agile coaches and trainers who allowed me to join their community in 2021. I learned so much for these agile coaches. The agile community is awesome because it’s not about “me”, it’s about “we”. The community helps each other and in turn the teams and company benefits.

Reach out and network. Learn from others. Help teach and coach.

I’m excited about 2022. More to come.

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