North BayAPLN August meeting note

I'm back home from this month's North BayAPLN meeting, which took place at the Salesforce building in Market St, San Francisco. David Chilcott, principal at Outformations, gave a presentation on Effective agile meetings. The premise is to apply lean thinking and to extrapolate scrum practices to the way we plan and conduct meetings, and that by doing so meetings become cost effective and productive.

David suggests to manage a meeting as a sprint where the agenda is the backlog, an agenda item a feature, the desired outcome a user story, the agenda item owner is the product owner, etc.. Amongst other things he also talked about having roles and responsibilities within the meeting attendants, which I think is cool because not only the roles can rotate bu also because, and this is my point of view, is a subtle way to get attendants more involved and as result more attentive and productive. His presentation is available at the Outformations website.

Same as with agile-lean, most of what effective agile meetings is about is actually common sense. And as with agile-lean, even being common sense meetings are rarely planned and done right (or just good enough, if you know what I mean) until it is presented in a "formal" way.