Tag: collaboration

Agility Cafés 5&6: what we learned

Why go to an agility café? People keep coming back because it’s

  • a chance to connect and collaborate with a diverse group of people
  • get useful, practical tips and support to apply immediately
  • fun 🙂

Next café is on Feb 25 @ the Downtown Association. Read more and register.

Topics from the last two sessions:

  1. End of road discussions – requests for assistance outside of our capacity
  2. How to create more chances between each other to collaborate?
  3. How to handle marketing multiple services?
  4. How to prioritize projects?
  5. How to manage committees as clients?

And… the results:

End of road discussions – requests for assistance outside of our capacity

Key takeaways:

  • Make it clear what can and can’t be done, in a friendly way. FAQs are useful, provide information in form of scenario/response.
  • Not all customers can be served and satisfied. It’s ok to choose who your customers are.
  • Choose not to listen to ongoing complaints – set boundaries

How to create more chances between each other to collaborate

How to manage marketing multiple services (or, how to gain focus and traction when dealing with many choices)

How to prioritize

Prioritize attributes
Attributes to prioritize on

Key takeaways:

  • Decide on the prioritization attributes that matter, and use those to compare options. Profit, capacity, deadlines are a few examples.
  • Give yourself breathing room to be able to make choices, to re-prioritize as needed
  • Don’t try to please everyone! Making choices means choosing not to do some things, or to delay responding to requests until more important stuff is taken care of.

How to work with clients who decide everything by committee

Ideas for working with committees
Ideas for working with committees

Problem: committees taking too long to make decisions, or re-visiting decisions again and again, thus delaying project and value, increasing cost.

Ideas:

  • Find a lever to motivate decisive action: project cost, schedule, or scope reduction due to increase costs and delays.
  • Set up contracts to provide incentive to collaborate. There are examples of Agile contracts that do this, encouraging both sides to work as a team to deliver faster, reduce cost and increase value.

Agility Café #4: How to support remote sales team?

Mmm good soupBob Bonell

At this café, we came up with 3 topics, and got through two:

1. Functioning on a board of directors
2. Linking remote sales efforts / people
3. Marketing multiple services

Bill Murphy shared his situation, with sales agents working individually in various parts of Canada, and a desire to have them as a group better share ideas, build camaraderie and feel connected. Listen to his 1 minute video summary for what we came up with:

About Agility Café

The Agility Café happens every Friday at Dish, 12 – 1:15 pm. Register here to get one of the limited seats. Drop-ins welcome too.

We eat business obstacles for lunch. What’s in your way of delivering more value, at higher quality, with wayyyy more fun?

Format is simple. Come with a topic or two in mind or just an open mind. We’ll brainstorm at the beginning all the topics people want to discuss, then prioritize them. We’ll try and get through as many as we can. Learn from each other, and get your caffeine fix. When it’s over, it’s over. 🙂

This is a free event, an experiment in informal coaching and mentoring, and building community.