How do you ensure structured and meaningful meetings with high participants involvement without requiring extensive preparations? At Engage Group we have adopted a “Lean Coffee”- approach for our reoccurring Architecture Board meetings.
Lean Coffee
The idea of “Lean Coffee” as a meeting concept was born in Seattle in 2009. Founders Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith wanted to create a simple, yet efficient meeting format. The emphasize should be on providing “the least structure necessary for a coherent and productive meeting. No more, no less”. – Leancoffee.org
How does Lean Coffee work?
- Set up a Kanban Board – Create a Kanban board to provide a structure for the conversation
- Decide what to discuss – Add topics for conversation into the Kanban board
- Vote and Talk – Vote for topics to discuss
Architecture Board at Engage
At Engage Group we have adopted the “Lean Coffee” concept to facilitate our recurring Architecture Board meetings. Considering the key concept of providing a structured approach, yet with minimal preparation, it allows us to have meaningful discussions with our team of highly experienced Dynamics 365 Solution- & Technical architects that is typically very busy in various customer engagements.
Due to the pandemic and geographical challenges of being located at different physical locations, we run these gatherings as virtual meetings where we take advantage of virtual collaboration tools such as Miro.
We start by spending a few minutes on brainstorming and adding topics to discuss using a virtual Kanban bord and sticky notes.
When the number of topics start reaching a certain point, we start voting on topics to discuss (each participant gets two votes).
Finally, we start discussing the highest voted topic. The sticky note is then moved to the “Discussion” column. Typically, we spend 10 minutes per topic with the possibility to extend by 5 minutes depending on need. When completed, we move the sticky note to “Discusses” and then continue with the next topic.
Actions derived from the various discussions are added into a separate “Actions”- column for follow-up purposes. See example below:
Conclusion
The Architecture Board is a vital part of Engage Group’s philosophy of creating a “learning first culture” where we continuously share our experiences and challenge way of working. We believe this creates an inspiring work environment which ultimately is beneficial to our clients.
What is you experience of using an Architecture Board in a Dynamics 365 context? If you are interested to learn mot about the Architecture Board at Engage, do not hesitate to reach out to us.
