Month: January 2015

Do You Lean Coffee?

chriswmoody1 Comment

Have you ever used the Lean Coffee format for a meeting?   It’s a tool I’ve been so pleased to use in a variety of formats in recent years.  I’ve used it for governance meetings, team retrospectives, and open agenda meetings where there is no pre-existing agenda other than to do Lean Coffee.

What is the Lean Coffee format?

The following content is copied from http://leancoffee.org/  “Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.”

1. Set up a Personal Kanban

Simple Personal Kanban for Lean Coffee

In this Personal Kanban we have the items to discuss, what we are currently discussing, and the discussed columns.

This provides a structure for the conversation. Next we populate it

2. What to Discuss

A Populated Backlog for the Personal Kanban

People all get pads of post-it notes and a pen. They then start to add their topics for conversation into the “to discuss” column. These can be literally whatever people want to discuss or follow a theme. Right now, we want to encourage as many unique ideas as we can.

When the ideas start reach a certain point (an you’ll be the best judge of when that is), each topic gets a 1 to 2 sentence introduction. This way people know what to vote for.

3. Vote and Talk

Stockholm Late Night Lean Coffee

Each participant gets two votes. You can vote twice for the same thing or for two different topics. Simple put a dot on the sticky you are interested in. Tally the dots. Then you are ready to have a conversation.

The power here is that you now have a list of topics everyone at the table is interested in and is motivated to discuss for real.

End of content from leancoffee.org website.

Some benefits of using the Lean Coffee format:

  1. It’s highly collaborative!
  2. It supports the discipline of being a self organizing team.
  3. It helps to crowd-source the agenda. People have skin in the game because they got to vote about what is being discussed
  4. Time boxing helps to keep the meeting from getting stale and boring.
  5. The proof is in the pudding. Some of the best conversations I’ve every been a part of have been while using the Lean Coffee format.

Examples of when Lean Coffee may not be the best idea:

  1. You have a very specific agenda that needs to be adhered too.
  2. There’s only 2-3 participants in the meeting.
  3. You are talking with customers or the participants may have never heard of lean coffee.
  4. Your participants are knowingly “anti agile”.
  5. If you know the majority of the participants of the meeting are not typically not inclined to talk in a group. Dominating personalities will control the conversation and others could become bored and find it a waste of time. (with the right coaching this risk could be avoided)

Need more info still?  Here’s a great video showing a sample lean coffee meeting.

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Agile Tool: Trello

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If you are anything like me, I’m always looking for great agile tools to add to my arsenal.

I stumbled Trello the other day and I must say I’m pretty impressed! So far I can say that it’s great for personal Kanban or small internal projects. And it’s free!

Notable Features: You can easily invite people into your boards to collaborate,  view version history, add pictures to cards, and create custom lists. There’s a guided tour function that is really helpful to give you a jump start into using the tool.   Another feature I think is really helpful is the ability to create check lists within a card.  This would be a great way to keep track of tasks within a story.  My personal favorite feature is the ability to add a deadline to a card…So helpful for planning out a light weight project or really any small effort needing coordination.

Enterprise Use: From what I can tell this would not be a great Enterprise tool due to some features missing like rolling up cards into epics or portfolios.  I’ve heard this same feedback from 4-5 colleagues.  However, my observations are based on the free version, not some of the paid options they have, which very well could have those additional features.

Personal Use: I created a board for a home projects and invited my wife to the board.  We can both individually add projects or honey do’s and change the order of the stack rang for our backlog. (It’s fun to see how we have different priorities 🙂 )  The mobile app works quite well and does pretty much everything I would want it to do from my phone.

Conclusion: If you are looking to get more organized and incorporate some of the agile principles into your life and work, Trello is worth checking out!

Image source:  Trello.com