Looking for a good starting place for the agenda for your next meeting? Here is a Google Sheet that you can use. There is more here than you will likely need for any meeting, so just remove the stuff that you don’t need.
A great engineering manager knows how to run effective meetings. A written agenda is the road map that these meetings follow to success. When your meeting invite includes a well-crafted agenda, the participants are more likely to arrive on time and well prepared. Your meeting is set to move quickly to a successful outcome, and it might even end early!
This Tuesday evening I’ll be facilitating What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? at the BayAPLN meeting. This is the Bay Area chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network. The event is free and open to the public, but you must RSVP.
Cheers,
At the April meeting of the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group, I did a presentation on doing presentations. Here are the slides. You might also want to check out these past posts about presenting.
Cheers,
On April 23rd, I had the pleasure of facilitating a 1/2 day workshop: From Tester to Leader, at the Targeting Quality conference in Waterloo, Ontario. To get things rolling, we examined what it means, and what it takes to be a leader in the context of a QA group. We used the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink process to list the qualities of the best leaders that the participants had worked with.
Have you struggled to convince the ‘powers that be’ that your organization should make the move to agile? While the benefits seem obvious to ‘us’, it often seems like ‘they’ just don’t get it. Are our business leaders stupid? Usually, the answer is no. They simply have a different perspective, language, and set of values.
On Wednesday, I’m doing a presentation on doing presentations. One of the little gems that I was looking forward to passing on was Lucky Oliver. It has been my favorite source for images for presentations and the web. The quality and variety of the images has been consistently great, and the prices were more than affordable. Today I discovered that Lucky Oliver will be closing down on May 15th. I’m sad to be losing this source for great photos, and sad to see the business fail. Best of luck to Bryan, and everyone else at Lucky Oliver.
Now where am I going to get my images? Any suggestions?
Cheers,
Greetings!
I’m back home, in the San Francisco Bay Area, after a couple of weeks on the road. I went to Chicago for the Scrum Gathering, where I presented Agile 101, and What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? I also facilitated a couple of open space sessions. Notes from one of those, Let’s Practice Agile Estimation, can be found here on the Agile Alliance Wiki.
OK, this isn’t really from the Technical Management Institute (now Agile Learning Labs), but I think it sets a high bar for computer-based learning.
Cheers,
Greetings from the 2008 Chicago Scrum Gathering! On Monday I led two sessions: Agile 101, and What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? I also led a session on agile estimation in the open space portion of the conference.
Almost 50 people gathered to consider the question: What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? In under an hour and a half, we generated and ranked about 50 ideas. Here, in order, are the things that this group felt had the biggest impact on the success of the agile projects that they have been involved with. You can compare this list with generated by previous groups here, here, and here.