LightSpeed’s annual team retreat took us back to Misty Cliff’s on the Cape Peninsula, where we spent four days collaborating, socialising and connecting with colleagues.  Our primary objective was to get the whole LightSpeed team together, including our colleague Virginia who lives in Chile, so we decided to fly her out here to join us for the week!

A goal for the week was to develop a road map for our future software releases and to plan the next 4 week sprint, leading up to the release of a new LSX Blocks Theme, specifically developed to work with our LSX Blocks plugin.

But it’s also important for us to have down time during these intensive periods of collaboration.

This was the first time that we got to meet our Venezuelan counterpart Virginia, who lives and works in Santiago, Chile.  Meeting in person just confirmed that we already knew Virginia would fit right in with our off-beat crew!

Before lighting the braai fires, we did our retrospective of the last few months.  We all agreed that there was little that could be improved upon, which was a happy revelation for us all, and a good omen for the rest of our retreat workshops.

The first full day was spent planning workshop sessions for the following day, so that the team could split into design, development and project management groups to collaborate with each other.  Our planning session followed a different format to usual, employing the Getting Things Done methodology to work out all the Next Actions necessary to achieve a meaningful outcome form the following days workshops.

At the end of the third day we re-evaluated what was achieved and made sure that every mini project had a Next Action for the coming weeks.

The final day was spent in the Cape Point National Park, where our final, and longest standing team mate, Chris from Mossel Bay, joined us for a short hike to Cape Point and lunch at Two Oceans Restaurant.  This is the first time the entire LightSpeed team has been together in over 2 years!