Agile Notes (No. 48)

What is the purpose of this meeting?

Happy Friday! Thanks for reading. We continue with Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka. This week, we are moving on to Chapter 7: Preparing Participants for Collaboration.

Oh! My! God! I love this section so much!

I’m going to type out the bullet points in case you can’t read it through my obnoxious green highlights. Every meeting you host, going forward, needs to have its “sole and singular purpose” C.L.E.A.R.L.Y. D.E.F.I.N.E.D.

• It can be stated in the following way: ‘The purpose of the meeting is to…….’ where you can fill in an action (‘create,’ ‘define,’ ‘select,’ ‘produce’) followed by an outcome (‘process definition,’ ‘iteration scope,’ ‘Product Backlog,’ ‘set of use cases,’ ‘conceptual object model.’)

• It represents the outcome that would convince you (or whoever is the meeting’s sponsor) that the meeting has been a success.

I need to apologize. At my last company, this formula was NEVER followed. I am guilty of that. We were meeting/call happy. There were a few reasons for this but this is not the place for that. :) It was EASY to spend all day on meetings/calls. It was almost a requirement. None of them had a plan. None of them had a stated purpose. None of them had defined outcomes. It was easy for calls/meetings to go down tangential rabbit holes. So, yeah, I need to apologize to everyone who ever joined a call/meeting that I hosted where I did not have a purpose and desired outcome/output. I know better.

Sigh.

Adapt. Improve. Iterate. :)

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