Enjoy an AgiLean Coffee

In our last session on new ideas and new meeting formats for 2014, we discussed conducting a Lean coffee. At this meeting, we test drive the Lean coffee format. Come armed with your ideas to add to this starter list:

• Agile, Org. charts & American HR

• Mob programming

• Measuring Team Happiness

• Agile oxymorons

Lean Coffee Format:

• Everyone offers topics they are interested in discussing by writing them on index cards (or sticky notes).

• Everyone presents his or her topic as an Elevator Pitch (max 1 minute per topic).

• Use dot voting to vote on each of the topics. Each person gets two votes. You can only vote once per topic.

• Prepare three columns on a table or wall. Call them “Planned”, “In Progress” and “Done”. Add all topics to the “Planned” column, with those that received the highest votes at the top.

• Discuss each topic in turn. Move the index card for the topic into the “In Progress” column.

• Initially, ask the proposer to explain the topic, then go round the table to give an opportunity for everyone to provide an initial comment, then open discussion.

• When the topic is done, move on to the next one. The topic proposer decides when the topic is done, and moves the index card to the “Done” column. If someone disagrees, then s/he can raise a new topic.