Cory, Alan, and I on a meeting to talk about upcoming projects and make some plans. Cory and Alan were going over some numbers and projects. The first two sprints were very heavy and cost a ton. We knew that we needed to do some training, but it came in pretty expensive. We still have to hold hands with a lot of the developers. They need help with training, help, guidance, and experience. We are gaining on their comprehension and cooperation, but it is still a heavy lift. We talked about the value of teaching them the vision vs just teaching them the skills.

We talked about current progress, momentum, and time and energy costs for transitioning from project to project. That lead into some talks about trying to help standardize the local development environments and working through issues to help that process out. There is a balance between paying projects (client funded) and internal wants and needs (adilas funded).

Next we talked about some bottlenecks in training and how to help the guys with some of their problem solving strategies and skills. Sometimes, when they hit a blockade, they just stop, vs figuring out some other solution. We really need the guys to be able to fake things, mock things up, and even be able to jump out of the sequence(s) and do the next thing. Talking about strategies for problem solving.

I did some quick searching and found some stuff on overcoming a writer's block from a seminar that I attended. Here are some of those notes (element of time 4437 for the full notes).

- Writer's block - something went wrong with the story... how do you fix that...

>> Backtrack to where the disconnect happened

>> Put a plug in... something amazing happens here... keep going - do what you know

>> Push through to the end and you may need to circle back to fix some things - there will still be time, even if everything isn't fully fixed

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Next, we switched back to our current sprints. We are getting things done and we want to slow down and really get things fully integrated and tested before blasting forward. We may need to switch gears and do some smaller projects for a little bit. Helping our guys take a break and hit the pause button. Often, there is a huge value in having a buddy along to help get things finished.

We really want to keep pushing things up so that our users can start playing with it and using the new features. Another topic that came up was dealing with 3rd party solutions and their upgrade requirements and maintenance. Sometimes we just add in the 3rd party solutions and go forward. There isn't really a huge plan as far as future maintenance and required upgrades. Most of those things haven't been fully negotiated at this time. We will try better in the future. We'll try to pick up what we can and may have to do some of that our own, to keep things compatible.

Our last topic for the meeting was routing things and future projects through Cory as the coordinator. As part of that, Cory, Alan, and I are planning on our own little mini standup meeting to help improve daily communications.