Wednesday, October 7, 2009

My first IPM facilitation!

Today I had the daunting task of facilitating our team's bi-weekly IPM on my client site.

The team had decided that our IPM's were getting a bit stale and it was time to mix it up bit and rotate the facilitation through the team members. (also our poor PM has three IPM's in one day and no one wants to facilitate that many in one day!)

I have had the opportunity to see some of my ThoughtWorks colleagues in facilitating action. A great facilitator is like gold dust. Hopefully one day I can aspire to be up there with them.

I was a little bit nervous about standing up there in front of my co-sourced client and TW team, but once I got going I actually quite enjoyed it. I Made sure that I had all the little things organised like projectors and stickies and pens, and had prepped the night before, so was feeling reasonably ok about the whole thing.

It was really rewarding to look around the room and see engaged and smiling faces. People were having fun! Yay! It was also really great that some of the poeple who don't normally have the confidence to speak up, do so and to give some really on the money comments too.

Some great actionable ideas came out of our retrospective. Which stayed brilliant positive and forward thinking (we've been known as a team to be swallowed by a hole of complaining...). We had some great ideas ranging from Talk like a Pirate at Standup Day, to creating a daily updated dedicated space on our Wall for the QA's to shout about their progress.

I was on a total high afterward, and so pleased at the positive feedback. I can think of many areas to improve in, but chuffed with achieving quite a milestone at my time in TW.

Here are two of my favourite slides from today: