29Feb I received several e-mail comments on my last post on agile meetings. The most common was not about the cost of the meeting time, but about the inability of people to make all of the meetings. Some of the comments suggested having a wiki or something similar to share the results of each meeting with team members who could not attend the daily stand ups etc. Others suggested recording the meetings using conference calls or Webex-type recordings. I would have to voice my opinion that I don’t think either of these are good ideas. The daily stand up is an essential synchronization point for the team and should be attended by everyone everyday…unless there are really extenuating circumstances. Planning meetings, reviews and retrospectives are equally important and demand the attendance of all team members.
There are three key points I’d like to make about documenting agile meeting minutes. First, I believe that the more you enable people to not attend agile meetings the more you encourage the behavior. If team members have no place to read about the meeting or hear a recording, they’re forced to attend the live meetings. If team members can simply miss a meeting and read a wiki entry about the meeting, while adding their own update to the wiki, you’ve enabled and encouraged the behavior of missing meetings.
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28Feb This month, Dave Bouwman and I authored an article on agile project management for GIS development projects in GIS Development Magazine. The article was published in the hard copy magazine and is now available online also. If you’re interested in reading the article, check it out here.
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28Feb 
I’ve spent the past few days at the ESRI Petroleum Users Group Meeting in Houston. I’ve had the opportunity to sit through plenty of presentations in 3 days. I would have to say that not a single one was captivating, exciting, motivating…interesting. Please don’t rush to their defense and say “Well, petroleum GIS is pretty boring, what did you expect?”. Before you utter those words, I ask you this question: What do you think about copyright law? Pretty boring subject matter, right? Wrong…watch a presentation at the TED talks by Larry Lessig and you’ll agree, even dull topics can be presented in a lively, exciting, motivating, and interesting manner. Check it out here at the Ted Talks website. But, let’s not be so hard on the petroleum GIS world…let’s be honest, 99.9% of all PowerPoints suck and we all know it…and for you Apple people out there…your Keynote stuff ain’t much better.
So, please, let’s put an end to the meaningless waste of the human creative spirit and start putting some thought and design into our presentations. If you’re looking at your latest presentation and it’s full of slides with bullet points, charts, animations, and those cute little stick figure guys please…delete it now! You can do it, really. Take a deep breath, select the file, and press delete…don’t you feel better now? (I know I do).
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27Feb 
If you’ve been doing agile, and especially Scrum, you’re well aware of the meetings that are required to keep things running smoothly: (1) the iteration planning session, (2) the daily stand ups, (3) the iteration review session, and (4) the iteration retrospective. If you follow scrum by the book, a two-week iteration would include 18 hours of meeting time (8 hours for planning, 15 minute daily stand ups, 4 hours for review and 4 hours for a retrospective). That’s 22.5% of an 80-hour schedule for an iteration that is consumed by meetings. Many people argue that this is too much time spent in meetings over the lifetime of a project, especially if it’s an overhead or operational expense. I don’t necessarily disagree. However, these meetings are essential to effectively delivering value to clients and to the continuous improvement of a team’s agile practices. So, how do you handle this dilemma of balancing meetings that enable practices with project budgets, etc.? The answer: Use the scrum mantra “Inspect and Adapt”.
Our agile teams have examined our meetings and have effectively reduced our meeting time to the following: 2 hours for iteration planning, 15 minute daily stand-ups (and they’re usually shorter than that), 1 hour for our iteration review (usually shorter) and 1 hour for a retrospective (again, usually shorter). This amounts to only 6 hours (or less) of meetings for every two week iteration or 7.5% of the iteration spent in meetings. We think this is a manageable amount of time to dedicate to the various necessary activities of scrum to be both efficient and effective. I think that anything shorter than these times would probably start affecting the value of these agile practices. We are still planning without any problems and we are able to review two weeks worth of work in 1 hour or less with our clients. We have also found that 1 hour is more than enough for our retrospectives. Currently, we include these meetings in our project costs because we bid our projects as agile projects. Our clients are aware of the value these meetings provide their final product.
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