Tag Archives: minutes

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

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

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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 – We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Meeting Minutes

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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.