MexAPLN Feb 2010 meeting

MexAPLN Feb 2010 meeting took place last night at the offices of Software Guru Magazine, a modern looking floor with cool artwork on the walls. Definitely a nice place to work. We had 10 people, three of them new with one of them from the city of Puebla. The central topic was to thumbs-up our charter's vision, mission, values, and principles and will be available before the end of this week. The discussion was rather short thanks to off-line work by 7 members in that most of the discussions took place before the meeting. We did a first-pass at the objectives and will be discussing them further as well as the other parts of the charter with the intention to finalize it at our March meeting.

There are numerous ideas and enthusiasm to start executing. I don't see a reason for MexAPLN to become of of the best!

Note: Software Guru has been making reference to a blog in Spanish written by Armando Peralta, check it out!

MexAPLN meeting: January 2010

The second meeting of the MexAPLN was way better than the first one. The meeting was at the IDS offices. IDS is one of the two oldest sw dev services businesses in Mexico. Its building has a beautiful view of the 4th and 5th highest mountains in all of the American Continent.

This being the second session it was obviously very org related and the main subjects were:

• Alejandor Escamilla from Software Guru reported that they received over 400 responses from a member's blog posted on its website
• 12 people (including myself) attended the meeting, 5 of them first-time. One person actually drove 180 miles one-way just to be there and headed back to his city of origin, Morelia, the next morning! ...and I used to think my 60-mile drive was significant.
• We talked about what we need to do to be accepted as an actual chapter, about sponsorship and about logistics on meetings.
• I reported that VersionOne showed a lot of enthusiasm about becoming an sponsor once we are ready for it
• Main topic was Chartering. Since we were running out of time we decided to do some off-line work, discussing via web-conference to get more done and by the next meeting at which time we'll give it thumbs-up or down.
• We decided to use Google groups instead of Yahoo groups as one of our comm tools.
  
• Next meeting is at the offices or Software Guru.

Too much material for one session, of course but there was good progress.

Once this is done we'll have the foundation and a good start to become a relevant chapter.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

*** Important Note:
Paul Culling from VersionOne wrote a comment on the original posting, on which I used the workd "demands". My response is: Paul, I apologize if the word created some interpretation. One of the definitions of "demand" is "the requirement of work". The communication through Cesar has been quite clear and I informed at the meeting that VersionOne will be happy to become a sponsor, but first we have to prove that we are an active community of practitioners of agile and lean, and that is what is the requirement of work we have to do to earn your sponsorship.
I edited the posting in hope that you agree with the new wording, otherwise let me know and I'll be happy to rephrase it.
~Masa K Maeda

APLN chapters in Latinamerica

Back last June I came up with the idea of staring an APLN chapter in Mexico. After talkng about it with several people in both the USA--at the BayAPLN mainly David Chilcott and Cesar Idrovo--and Mexico (polling people to see how much enthusiasm there is about it) I decided to go for it. Coincidentally an agilist from Costa Rica, David Alfaro, contacted BayAPLN in October and so we held a teleconference USA-Mex-CR (since I was in Mexico on business those days) to brainstorm how to get those chapters started. I suggested David A and I to keep in close contact to share experiences and help each other out in addition to getting coaching from David C and Cesar.

Then in November I had the opportunity to meet a group of Brazilians let by Guilherme Chapiewski, who were in San Francisco for the QCon conference, and invited them to the BayAPLN meeting to be held the following day (talk about good timing). They all attended and loved it. Guilherme told me he would like to get a chapter started in Brazil.

Long story short, David A has been actively increasing awareness on agile in Costa Rica and is working towards getting the first meeting. We learned that a chapter in Brazil was started a while back but didn't succeed and current efforts are towards re-starting it. From my side the first MexAPLN (unofficial for now) took place on Dec 8th in Mexico City and was a great start, with 8 executives from diverse enterprises attending.

Several ideas I have in mind are:

• Leveraging the fact that we have close relationship with BayAPLN (with me now being part of the Coordinating Committee) to figure out ways to help those chapters get up and running.
• Growing the MexAPLN to become the prime chapter in Latinamerica
• Create a latinamerican APLN metachapter to have higher impact in that geographical area and organize world-class events.

Last BayAPLN meeting of 2009

The last BayAPLN meeting, held a the Tacit Knowledge offices, was a retrospective of the year. There were 24 people at the meeting, which is low for BayAPLN meeting standards but understandable given that lots of people are either out of town, shopping, or wrapping things up at work to finish the year in balance.

What was done and accomplished throughout the year was quite impressive, for example:

• 329 registrations at the yahoo group
• 394 registrations at the linkedIn group
• Average attendance per meeting was 44, and topped around 70.
• We had a pretty good number of Agile-Lean celebrities giving presentations at meetings on topics related to agile and: current economy, adoption patterns, group coherence, learning games, agile transition styles, scaling scrum, Personas and story maps.
• Co-sponsored the Agile Open California 2009 open space.

We also noted areas of improvement and action items for next year, such as:

• Better task distribution
• Make presentations more easily available on our website
• Increase knowledge, e.g., adding terms on Wikipedia
• Give support to new APLN chapters such as those in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil
• etc

We all look forward to an even better 2010. First meeting is Jan 19 and the activity is Chartering.

First MexAPLN meeting

The first MexAPLN meeting took place today at 7:45 PM at the Marie Callender's restaurant in Mexico City located on Insurgentes Avenue. Attendees were executives from diverse entities: Sergio Eduardo Duran Rubio (Accival), Martin Villalba Paredes (FIDEM), Alejandro Escamilla (Software Guru magazine), Armando Peralta and Ivan Carlos Rivera (Infotec), Jesus Flores, Jennifer Vazquez and René Molina (Bytline), and myself.

After introductions I talked briefly about how agile got started under a bottom-up approach and how as time has passed by, the practices matured, and the chasm has been crossed, executives are taking a more important and proactive role towards adoption thus the increase of top-down adoption. I then talked about what APLN is and, as a case, how BayAPLN operates. Next explained the benefits that MexAPLN can provide to industry and to us as professionals by bringing awareness on agile-lean.

Last we talked about the success factors and did some action planning for the next meeting, that time to be held at a company instead of at a restaurant.

To finish we did an intro planning pocker exercise for those new to it.