Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Test First Meeting Facilitation

This past 3 days, I’ve been hosting a group of authors and luminaries from the agile project management community. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this meeting all across the Internet over the next few days and weeks. I’ll be saying more about what we discussed and the outcome of the meeting next week (or later this week in my Yahoo! group). However, I thought I’d pause tonight, to mention not what we discussed but how we discussed it - test first meeting facilitation.

The idea really came (inadvertently) from Todd Little, a board member of the Agile Alliance, who kept asking “how will we know when we’re finished discussing this (important) topic?” The answer was to devise a test for completeness of the topic. So as we started each agenda item, we identified the test (or checklist) against which the output must be measured. Perhaps an hour or two later, we’d be at a point of consensus, then we’d say, “now let’s check this against our test to see if we’re done.” If it passed the test and everyone in the room had a thumb up, then it was minuted as agreed. If it failed the test, we kept discussing the outstanding points until we had a consensus agreement which passed the test.

The test represented the set of minimum criteria with which each participant in the session could live, i.e. if it didn’t pass their test then they would veto the whole thing. Asking people to define the veto hurdle focused each person on what was most important to them. This made the accumulated test sufficient without being bloated. When the test was passed, a consensus was reached (by default) because each participant had passed their veto threshold.

A simple but powerful mechanism and one that I’ll be using again.