Tag Archives: meeting

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Cool New Jobs in 2011

Leave a comment

Really enjoyed the great Derek Huether’s post about zombie meetings on his blog The Critical Path. And it got me thinking…perhaps our meeting-crazed corporate culture could actually spur some new job growth?

LAPTOP WALKER

Vacationing workaholics often chafe at their spouse’s demand to leave their faithful companion at home. So, offer your services as a laptop walker!

Assure your PM you’ll carry his laptop around the office to ensure it gets proper exercise while he’s away. The head of biz dev can rest easy knowing you’ll bring her laptop into meetings so it can be with other laptops. And thanks to your laptop grooming service, your scrum master will be greeted upon his return by a sparkling clean laptop fresh from its anti-bacterial wipedown, cucumber-melon scented compressed air bath and deep registry cleaning. Appreciation to Chuck Twining for the idea.

STEALTH SCRIBE

Thanks to Agile’s lean documentation tenets, meeting minutes in general have fallen out of fashion. They’re useful, alright (see my previous post on the subject). But some feel they’re a wasteful time-suck, that time saved not doing them can yield more time to write code. That means YOU have to waste more time verbally bringing last week’s absentees up to speed, and argue about what you thought you decided.

But you can have meeting minutes without risking being taunted with epithets like “Agile Wannabe” or “Waterfallooza”. Take the minutes in secret! There are lots of ways to do this. Pretend you’re answering emails while other attendees are talking – completely believable as Fred’s actually doing just that across the table anyway. Use the notes feature on your iPhone – your unsuspecting colleagues will think you’re texting your fantasy team picks while you’re really documenting what you agreed to track on the new landing page. Hah – pwnage!

MEETING BOUNCER

Let’s finally get serious about meetings – time to put the hammer down on equivocators, pontificators and serial opiners. As meeting bouncer, you’ll put attendees on notice that you’re prepared to throw their sorry asses out of the conference room/phone bridge for offenses like:

– Side conversations
– Beginning any remark with the words “In this tough economy”
– Checking into Foursquare – there is no mayor of Conference Rm #203 to oust
– Reading all the words off their PowerPoint slides verbatim
– Not knowing the function-key F8 trick
– Mouth-breathing so loud that call-ins think they called an x-rated chat line

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Why the Numbers Still Don’t Match

Leave a comment

So you got a business intelligence system. It’s gonna be great! No more frustrating meetings where you spend half an hour wrangling over whose sales number is right! One source of truth, pure and simple! Suckerrrrr. Like Oscar Wilde said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple.

For instance, your BI system will have selectable date ranges – Harry will pick Monday through Sunday, Sally will opt for Sunday through Saturday, and they’ll both label it as “last week” on their slides. And then, there’s the problem of departmental myopia.

The data:

The Simple Question: How many widgets did we sell last week?

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TEAM

Ten. You put ‘WDGT’ in the prompt box. There’s ten of those. Where did the other two go? I don’t know, but feel free to put in a ticket and we’ll look into it after the tomorrow’s sprint 5 release.

FINANCE

Four. The ones with the MarginBuster promo are zero margin, so they aren’t really sales. Damn those Marketing guys…

MARKETING

Eight. Our MarginBuster promo code brought in eight sales. Gotta run, getting my chest waxed this afternoon.

WEB ANALYTICS

Three. WebTrends says three. Offline sales? Uh, geez, I seem to have left my abacus at home, bro. No taggie, no countie.

OPERATIONS

Eleven. One canceled. Sales guaranteed him the widget would get him first position on Google for the term “cool”.

FULFILLMENT

Four. We don’t count the load if it ain’t in their abode. If it ain’t come to fruition, you don’t get your commission. If it ain’t off the truck, it’s not worth a…well, we don’t count it yet.

SALES

Twelve. Gimme my bonus.

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Hello Cleveland! If You Can’t See Them, Is It Still Agile?

1 Comment

The scrum or stand-up meeting is a major part of Agile methodology.  Ideally, everyone works in the same area (called co-location), and talking in person is considered the most effective way to work.  In fact, face-to-face communication is considered so important to the effectiveness of the methodology, it has its own line in the Agile Manifesto: The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

But there’s a wrinkle – it’s estimated that over 25% of American workers now telecommute, and that’s increasing.  Others work in offices located states or even oceans away from their co-workers.   How does this new state of affairs affect the future of Agile methodology?

Well, the simple answer is that it makes it harder and potentially less effective.   The line actually refers to communication between the developers themselves, but business owners, SME’s, and other key players in a project are affected as well.  What are some ways around that?  

CONFERENCE CALLS –  If the scrum is truly 10-15 minutes long like it’s supposed to be, it isn’t so awful if it’s a conference call.   But the problem with conference calls is that they take sometimes take 10-15 minutes to start.   The conference bridge has a glitch that makes everyone sound like they’re speaking from the Field of Dreams cornfield (oddly, sometimes with the same dialogue).  The scrum master says “Who just joined?” eight times after eight beeps because we all know only rubes say their name when the Webex robo-facilitator asks you to.    You all wait a few minutes for the lead developer who it turns out is taking a personal day.  Her boss would have told you that, if he hadn’t overslept the 8am EST call because it’s 5am in Seattle and he got home from the Muse concert at 2:30.  Then you have to ask Monty the mouth-breather to put it on mute, IM Jerry to quit answering emails because his keyboard tapping is making the microphone cut out the first two words of everyone’s sentences, ask Sandy to mute as well because you just heard the last call for two US Airways flights as well as her Starbucks order….that’s the bad news.  The good news is that on a conference call, you can’t see the developers’ eye-rolling when the business people speak.

VIDEO-CONFERENCING

Ha!   Teleconferencing is a cruel hoax.   Remember how disappointed you felt when you were 15 and found out Bill Gates wouldn’t really send you $149 for forwarding that Microsoft email?   I feel that way every time someone suggests a teleconference.  People say it’s real, but no one you know has ever had it pay off.    Some still try.  This usually requires plugging, unplugging, replugging, stabbing the f8 key repeatedly, giving up and locating one of the two people in the whole company who know how to set up teleconference, the guy comes in and performs the A/V equivalent of alchemy and then tells them they just had to hit f8.  By that time, the office you’re trying to remote with has dispersed and the next meeting group is knocking on the window because they need the conference room.

Here are links to a couple of decent articles about the effect on Agile process when teams can’t be in the same place at the same time.  The consensus is that Agile can be done when co-workers aren’t together, but it’s just not quite as good as when they can smell each other’s coffee.  Or Red Bull.

http://www.smartagile.com/2007/11/agile-tips-when-co-location-is-not.html

http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/is-telework-the-face-of-the-ag.html

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Meeting Minutes

2 Comments

I once read a blog post that said there shouldn’t be any meeting minutes in the world of Agile because:
1) the absence of minutes will force people to attend meetings
2) every moment a developer is forced to document is a lost opportunity to write code.
3) meeting minutes will undermine collaboration by – you guessed it – enabling people to miss meetings.

So if it weren’t for those pesky meeting notes, developers and business owners would go to the meetings instead of watching their kindergardener’s holiday plays, attending funerals, taking a sick day, going to the dentist, or waiting for AAA to fix the flat tire?
So, following that logic, you take them away, and folks willl straighten up and haul their sorry kid-applauding, condolence-spewing, virus-harboring, floss-neglecting, side-of-the-road-loafing asses to the scrum meeting where they belong. Assuming they don’t trip on the hubris on the way to the meeting room.

Come on now. Lighten up. People miss meetings. Eliminating meeting documentation doesn’t make it happen less often. It just magnifies the loss in productivity when it does happen.

But no one really reads them. Really? I just read some today because I had to – uh – miss a meeting. Plus, I wrote some meeting notes last week. That act prevented needing another meeting when a colleague was asked to present insights from that meeting to his boss. Would writing them on his hand be more Agile than having a brief, cohesive synopsis of what we discovered? There are wikis, Sharepoint, MeetingSense – it need not take more than a few minutes to document.

Scrums are supposed to be progress meetings, but they’re frequently more than that. Opinions are sought. Decisions are made. Commitments are pledged. They deserve to be quickly recorded. Don’t want to take the extra few minutes? How long is a “we need to get Brad up to speed” verbal briefing take out of a 15-minute scrum? How long does a call-and-response chorus of “but you said…”, “no, I believe I said” take to resolve?

Write it down already.