We had lively and insightful discussion today, mostly focused on the “Purpose” stage of the GTP project planning model.

We spent some time mocking the start-up culture of the late 90s and how most companies operated without any trace of purpose for a business i.e. no one seemed to care that the primary purpose of a business is to “make money”.  Given that though, we agreed that start-ups do need a different mindset.  If they are only focused on making money, they may never get off the ground.  As Larry pointed out, the exit strategies for some entrepreneurs is just to sell out or take the company public.  And that is fine, as long long as they understand that IS the purpose.

We concentrated on our internal processes for the second half of the meeting, especially about the purpose of our daily stand-up meetings (a key part of the agile project methodology).  It seems like we abuse the daily stand-up for things that are not serving the actual purpose of that meeting.  We kind of agreed on some ground rules (informally) that directly address the purpose of this daily stand-ups: bubble up the external roadblocks to the top and find internal resources for technical blocking issues.

Some ideas we generated:

• focus exclusively on individual blocking issues
• be more specific about what an individual is working on or planning to work on rather than vaguely saying “I am working on 123 project for XYZ bank”
• maybe adopt/develop sophisticated tools that will give real-time access to the same blocking information rather than wait 24 hours to spit out the details in the “next stand-up” meeting?

Chapter 3 has the makings of a great topic already.  Join in next time if you missed the meeting today!