Trials

A trial is your opportunity to show what you can do. Be it an internal prototype, or a 30 day trial of a software product, someone is giving you the chance to prove what you can do so give it your full attention.

An example from the real world, I’m getting married in a few weeks and my fiancé booked a trial with the local hair stylist. On the day she was fobbed off with the apprentice, who did a very bad job. This wasn’t her fault she didn’t have the experience to do the job. When my fiancé complained that this wasn’t what she asked for and what would happen next, she had to wait an hour and half for the head stylist to come and speak to her.

What did she say “it won’t be like this on the day”.

This morning my fiancé called to cancel her six appointments for the wedding. The owner asked “is there any we can do to fix this?”

Too late you already had the chance to prove what you and your team could do and you blew it.

This is a good rule for life in general when presented with the chance to shine, make the most of it.

Meetings

I’ve recent felt that my team meetings and 1-to-1s 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-1s for thirty minutes every two weeks. 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-1s 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.

MBA’s

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