Digitaljamfactory

I’ve recent felt that my team meetings and 1-to-1’s with my team were not as productive as I would like. I’ve been thinking about how to get better value from of them.

Currently I have 1-to-1’s for thirty minutes every two week’s. Initially they were one after another on Friday evening but it’s commonly known that if something goes wrong, it’s going to happen on Friday evening after three so I’ve struggled to keep to the times.

We have two team meetings, one on Tuesday morning and a follow up on Friday morning.

The reason I picked Tuesday for the main team meeting was that the business priorities for the week were set in an exec meeting on Monday evening. So the idea was to wait and give the team as much info as possible. Since we started these meetings we have adopted scrum for project planning so the priorities are now set by the business team on the Friday before the start of a sprint so now there is a little lag.

The Friday meetings often got cancelled as we either had 1-to-1’s on Friday evening or were really pushing to finish a sprint and we had a sprint demo in the evening.

Yesterday I read the latest excellent post on rands entitled “A Deep Breath”. I really like his meeting schedule. So what I’m going to try is the following:

Every Monday have a fifteen minute 1-to-1 with everyone on the team. Follow this with a one hour team meeting before lunch. We will continue with our fifteen minute scrum meetings everyday at ten in the morning. On Friday we will have a thirty minute “look at what we did” meeting. If it is the end of a sprint we will hold the sprint demo otherwise we will discuss our progress during the week.

I’m currently involved in a large redevelopment project in my day job, a question has come up. How long will a message spend in our messaging layer (but it could be applied to the system as a whole)? This is an excellent question. We can determine this using Little’s law, (Thanks Eamonn).

Little’s law states that

The long-term average number of customers in a stable system L (known as the Offered load), is equal to the long-term average arrival rate, λ, multiplied by the long-term average time a customer spends in the system, W, or: L = λW

If we know that at our peak we will be recieving 200 messages a second and the backlog in the messaging layer is 20. Then we know that at peak a message will spend 100 milliseconds in the messaging layer. The trick here is to find the correct average figures.

I’ve always wondered if MBA’s are worth the money spent on them. I’m thinking about doing a part time masters this year so I picked up the “The 80 Minute MBA” to see what they are all about. It’s a short read, the name gives it away but it is full of really useful information and has a great bibliography which I will use to further my own study but after reading the book I don’t think I will be starting an MBA in the autumn.

One great piece of advice on leadership from the book is

if you want someone to do a good job then give them a good job to do