I’m the organiser of the West London Lean Coffee meetup and I thought it would be good to do some short write-ups of the events and an overview of what was discussed. Useful for those who attended and hopefully also for those who didn’t.
(If you are wondering what a Lean Coffee is then take a look at the Lean Coffee website to find out more).
Topics We Discussed At Lean Coffee
Applying Agile To Non-Software Tasks
A good discussion about how you could apply agile to HR, finance, change management, etc. It got me thinking about this TED talk about how you could use agile to plan your families tasks.
What Is The Easiest Way To Transition To Cross Functional Teams
We got talking about how you could transition teams from being discipline focused, i.e. development team, test team, etc to cross functional agile teams. There’s some good examples in this blog post and also it’s worth thinking about skills mapping as part of the exercise.
Sizing In Points Vs Time
Is it best to size in points or time? Or both? Or neither? We talked about how you might bring two teams together who size differently, why the most important thing about sizing is not the method you use, but the fact that it gets the team to think about the tasks, and how that can help drive commitment.
Topics We Didn’t Get To Talk About
- PO = Business?
- Does agile estimation bring value?
- Idea to bring a good but impersonal team together.
Hope to see everyone next time. If you haven’t been before and fancy coming along then join the meetup group.