Thread by @WoodyZuill

I am going through old notebooks and junk to clean up and remove clutter from my house. I have a notebook that includes notes from my first day at Hunter, and my first meeting with the team that 6 months later would stumble upon the idea of #MobProgramming
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“My job is to make it possible for you to excel at everything you do here.”

I might rephrase this a bit if I were doing this over again, but it makes me feel good that this is the first thing I said to this team.

It’s a commitment I made to them, and to myself.

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That was my first point, and here is a synopsis of the rest of the points I shared:

2- Some things I value

- Respect for our customer, our coworkers, and our team
- Being effective as a team
- “Maximize the whole”
- Continuous improvement

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3 - Things I need help with

- I need to learn about the applications we support
- I need to know about the applications we are developing
- I want to meet and know about our customers

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4 - I would like to do a “ride along” with each team member to see the work we are doing and start to become familiar with the practices we use

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5 - I shared a few practices I’d like us to consider

- Daily conversation about what we are working on (we started with a Stand-up)
- Regular retrospectives (we quickly added the daily retrospective as well)

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6 - The importance of dedicated training and learning sessions.

- We would have a 3 hour block each week to study and practice together. This would be voluntary
- We would also take time for “real time” sessions whenever we felt we needed to stop and learn something

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I closed with this:

“I encourage you to to bring an attitude of openness and good will to the effort”

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I’m not saying that what I did here is particularly good, it’s just a little historical background on my first work meeting with this team that hired me to help them become “Agile”. That was a bit over 9 years ago. Thanks for letting me share this with you.

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