Host a Lean Coffee Online

Today’s post is a how-to for hosting a Lean Coffee session online.

If you don’t know what a Lean Coffee is, head over to leancoffee.org. The short version is: it’s a loosely structured way to have short conversations about topics that interest the most people in the “room.”

What you’ll need:

  • Some people to have the conversation with (of course!)
  • A web conferencing tool, like zoom or google hangouts, to have an asynchronous conversation with your participants. I prefer something with video, because it streamlines the discussion to be able to see when people thumbs up or down. However, you can also use something with a chat window.

  • A stopwatch or timer.
  • A whiteboard or similar collaboration tool. I have used Trello, Miro, Mural, Fun Retrospectives, Zoom whiteboard, even Jira for this. My favorite options are Fun Retrospectives (because it’s very easy to set up and share) or Mural.
    • Trello requires you to link to a team, which can be an obstacle for ad hoc discussions.
    • Miro requires a paid account if you have more than a few boards, so your discussion might deactivate a board from someone else on your team. Also, Miro’s UI is frustrating because the default is click-to-drag-the-entire-whiteboard instead of, say, click to drag a single item.
    • Mural….
    • Zoom’s whiteboard doesn’t allow the host to move items. You want to be able to move contributions around.
    • Fun Retrospectives is a good tool for this, and has built-in “dot voting.”

1) Set up your board.

Tip: If you are using Trello, install the vote power-up for Trello. You’ll use this for the initial topic generation and voting portion of the Lean Coffee. To install it, go to your Trello board and click the Menu link. Click “Power Ups” and scroll down to Voting. Click Enable to add it to your board.

Note that you can only have one Power-Up per Trello board if you are a free user.

2) Add the following headers to the top of your board: To Discuss, Discussing, Discussed, Takeaways.

3) Schedule your Lean Coffee with friends, colleagues, etc. using the conferencing/chat tool of your choice (slack, Zoom, whereby, etc.) Be sure to invite them to whiteboard if it requires it.

4) When the time comes, go over the Lean Coffee process, and then invite everyone to add a card to the Topics list.

5) Have each person who added a card read it and give no more than 30 seconds of context.

6) Tell your participants to vote on up to three of the topics by placing a dot or other icon next to the topics they want to discuss the most.

7) Sort the Topics list by vote and move the topmost one (with the most votes) from the To Discuss list to the Discussing list.

8) Start a timer for 3 minutes.

9) Call on someone to start the discussion. While calling on the person who made the card is usually a good choice, this carries the risk that they will dominate the entire time (because they are most invested in the card).

Tip: Be aware of good takeaways and add them to the Takeaways column. Anyone in the call can do this!

10) When the timer goes off, hold up your hand or post in the chat while people are still talking to get a vote on whether the discussion is still adding value or not.

11) If you get more thumbs up votes than neutral or negatives, set the timer for another 90 seconds. Repeat from step 10 until there are more negative or neutral votes.

12) When there are more negative or neutral votes than positives, the majority of people in the call are not getting much value from the topic. Call an end to the topic (you may even have to interrupt the person currently speaking) and move the card from Discussing to Discussed.

Repeat from step 7 until you are at the end of the time set aside for your Lean Coffee.

Agile and AWS: A Presentation at AWS Las Vegas

Jon Hathaway and Alex Singh, presenters of Agile and AWSWednesday night, I went to a presentation on Agile and AWS held by AWS Las Vegas at Innevation Center. The speakers were Jon Hathaway of HATech, and Alex Singh of OrgAgility. The presentation was primarily a case study of transitioning slot machine manufacturing giant IGT into having a lean, Agile DevOps team and company culture to support it. By coaching the DevOps team in using Agile and AWS, they report that IGT reduced the time to upgrade slot machines on the floor from 18 months to 2 weeks.

That’s a phenomenal reduction in time, and I was very impressed with their results.

My One Takeaway

I took three pages of notes during the presentation. A lot of it was repeat information from my experiences with Agile, but I always like to have one takeaway to share, and here’s the one I chose from last night:

In this particular DevOps team, each day was like a mini-iteration. They start the day with a standup, like most teams, but that standup plans the goals and tasks for that day only. This keeps the team extremely flexible and able to solve problems. Multi-day tasks can be tackled, but if they have a higher priority item come in, they can switch focus on that item for one day, then refocus on the next. This reduces the overhead from context-switching. Employees are already context-switching by going home at night, so changing focus in the morning doesn’t reduce more productivity.

There were a lot of other topics and tons of information on using Agile and AWS, so much so that I felt almost like we were cramming a 2-day session on Agile into 90 minutes! But it was a very solid talk and both Alex and Jon were highly receptive to questions from the attendees.

Can You Get Unicorns? Agile Estimating and Planning at the Las Vegas Agile User Group

Agile Estimating and Planning was the topic of the first Agile and Scrum User Group meeting here in Las Vegas on Monday night, and it was a good one!

A little club business

In the last 3 months, Jim Schiel reached out to users of numerous local IT-related groups to invite them to join this new meetup group. As a result, we are now over 50 members and growing! Our first meeting was April 24th, and had about 8 attendees– not bad for a first time! We started by talking about the group and organization, then did introductions. The group was a wide range, from project managers and scrum masters like me, to developers and IT administrators. Slightly more than half were currently unemployed.

A great presentation

Can you get unicorns?Jim then gave a 90-minute presentation on Agile estimating and planning. He led an exercise in which we created and sized a backlog for a wedding. The exercise was a bit fun and a bit frustrating. I took on the role of an enthusiastic bride (the customer): “Of course the carriage should be pulled by horses. Unless you can get unicorns! Can you get unicorns?”

Jim’s a trainer and coach for numerous Agile methodologies, including Scrum. He explained the difference between estimating by “effort,” such as work hours or ideal person days, versus “size,” like story points or t-shirt sizing used in Scrum.

Some useful numbers I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget them:

When estimating the deliverable date, use the following formula:

backlog size/velocity * a variable = the number of iterations to complete the backlog.

This is a common approach, though it doesn’t really account for changes in the backlog after development has begun. The variable mentioned above is just for the team’s ability to work together:

  • If your team has worked together and is already a good, Agile team, with a fairly consistent and known velocity, the variable number is about 1.2 (adding 20%).
  • If your team is experienced-but-learning, multiply by 1.4 (adds 40%).
  • If your team is new, or they haven’t done Agile before, or there’s lots of technical debt, multiply by 1.7 or 1.8 (add 70-80%).

This really highlighted the importance of a strong team. Jim tried to hammer home that an organization’s process maturity isn’t its agility– the people/culture are its agility.

What’s next?

What’s next for the Agile and Scrum User Group? The next currently scheduled meeting isn’t till July, but I’m planning a Lean Coffee sometime in May or early June so we don’t lose momentum.