"Why I don't like Monday's" - Agile 2007 Day 1

Waking up at 3:45 am isn’t the best way to start a conference. But it was the only way I could make it to Jean Tabaka’s session “Why I don’t like Mondays”. The effort paid off.

Jean’s talk riffs on the Boomtown Rats song “Why I don’t like Mondays” and poses the questions what’s wrong with Agile meetings and how to improve them. The presentation (pdf ) covered a lot of ground in 90 minutes:

• Top 10 Dysfunctions of team meetings (aka smells): Meetings are repetitive, Same people do all the talking every meeting, …
• How to fix the Monday Morning Blues: Purpose/Agenda, Ground Rules, Parking Lot, ORID, ….
• Creative ideas (Roger von Oech "Creative Whack Pack")

• Consider Meetings as mini iterations – they need to be planned and we should reflect on their outcomes.

My ToDo list out of this session:

1. Use ORID in retrospectives
2. Reflect briefly at the end of every meeting
3. Get the team to set our ground rules (i.e. no phone calls, email, …)

If you missed the session grab the slide deck and read Jean’s book – Collaboration Explained (heck buy the book anyway I did).

Later in the day I also attend Diana Larsen’s "The First Thing to Build: Leveraging Trust on Agile Teams". I was a lot more tired by then and so struggled to stay awake let alone focus. Diana spent a lot of time discussing how to build trust on a team and spot when the team doesn’t have that trust. Slides (pdf again).

Sorry I don’t have the energy for a better set of notes. I suspect all of my postings this week will be rushed.

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Comments

[Rafael]

Theres typos on the pdf files links. Theres a ")" in the end of on link and a ")." in the end of the another link.

Good pdf this "I dont like Mondays", really good.