The first session I attended at Agile 2007 was named “I don’t like Mondays.” It was a session that discussed improving agile process and team events. In a nutshell it was about having effective meetings. Jean Tabaka from Rally Software Development presented. She did an excellent job as she did the first time I heard her speak. The session started by discussing how the meeting/documentation ratio has inversed in agile from traditional methodologies. At least it should have as that is one of the main principles of Agile, Communication vs. Documentation. Jean also goes on to discuss the top 10 meeting dysfunctions. Think about your last meeting and see how many of these were the case with your meeting.
- Meetings are repetitive, they are all the same
- The same people do all the talking
- Subjects are beaten to death, again and again
- We come to decisions just to get out of the meeting
- People say they don’t have time to code because they are in too many meetings
- We have too many people in our meetings
- We have too few people in our meetings.
- With the constant stream of meetings, we are treated like machinary and not people.
- Our demos and reviews nearly bring about about anything new.
- All decisions were made outside the meeting anyway, we just have the meeting to be told what do do.
Jean also goes on to give some tools for collaboration. She suggests the following:
- Purpose and Agenda. She hangs the purpose on the whiteboard during the meeting.
- Personal Objectives
- Ground Rules/Agreements (Start on time, if you don’t you dishonor everyone on your team and one conversation at a time.
- Parking Lot - Decide to park the interesting but not useful conversations. These interesting but not useful conversations happen all too much.
- Action Plans - Build bridges back to cubicles. What, Whom, and When
- Definition of Consensus (This is definitely one I am taking back with me.) You can use the fist of five to determine if you have consensus. For the fist of five everyone holds up how many fingers to represent their consensus. 5 = Wild, complete support. 4 = This is a fine idea, wish I would of though of it. 3 = I can live with it and support it. 2 = I have reservations I’d like to think about. 1 = I am very opposed. Basically if everyone can give a three or higher then you can move on. I am not one for having to table discussions forever, however, there needs to be a point where everyone is on board and we are not going to waste any outside time getting everyone on bard.
- Facilitating Divergence
- Use Processes to manage disagreement.
- Round Robin
- Anonymous feedback
- Multi-voting
- Strong Voice answer Last
- Closing your meeting
- Retrospectives for success
Jean also pointed out an application where you can put in the average hourly salary of an employee and the number of employees. During the duration of the meeting the cost is being calculated. It is suppose to be somewhere on http://effectivemeetings.com/ but I couldn’t find it tonight.
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