APLN Houston

The APLN Houston leadership team took over a meeting room at a local library recently to reflect on the organization’s progress in 2010 and to reconfirm our priorities for the remainder of the year. Thanks to Sharvan Arra, Barbara Brown, Alan Bustamante, Jaynee Lafferty and Ron Whitebread for giving up a Saturday afternoon, to say nothing about their efforts on behalf of APLN Houston throughout the year.

Our first step was to conduct a retrospective on the year thus far. We did this in two parts, first just to reflect back and recognize what has been accomplished this year. Our membership has exceeded 600 and our meeting attendance has grown to 60+, with a high of 85. We continue to have a great relationship with Sysco and enjoy the use of their fantastic facility for our meetings. APLN Houston has incorporated, defined a business model, and created a sponsorship program to both sustain the present and the future. We established a partnership with Kumido Adaptive Strategies to jointly host our first training event, Innovation Games for Agile Teams, and we formalized our APLN Houston To Go program to extend our reach in the greater Houston area.

Part two of our retrospective took full advantage of the Innovation Games training that Alan and I attended to examine The Good Ship APLN Houston in the form of a Speed Boat game. What has made the boat go faster? What anchors are holding us back? Some of the appreciations (things that make us go faster) included leveraging a broad range of resources, acting as a self-organizing team, and good word-of-mouth promotion. The anchors included limited feedback from our members, too few volunteers, the need for a broader range of sponsors, and the recognition that as a team we have too much work in progress. The full results of the exercise can be seen here.

Next, we looked forward to the remainder of the year. How do we maintain what we are doing? How do we incorporate what we have learned? How do we make the most of the rest of the year? Another Innovation Game – Pruning the APLN Houston Tree – comes to our aid to set priorities within the context of the team’s capacity. The game starts with each of us placing an apple on the tree for each of the things we want to accomplish. Then we move into grouping like items and setting some priorities by arranging the apples in growth patterns around the tree; first we do this, then that, and then this. We also arrange the trunk and root system of the tree to grow those core items that are required to support the growth of the tree. This led us to identify six branches (work streams) for the APLN Houston tree: Sponsorship, Participation, Speakers, Events, Technology, and Venue.

To get a better sense of the amount of work we are taking on, we did a planning poker exercise to size the initial "apples" in each work stream, along with the core competency items needed to support them. The "tree" becomes our updated product backlog which can be seen here.

Finally, we agreed to respect the "too much work in progress" anchor by starting work on only three of the six work streams:

• Sponsorship: increasing the level and number of corporate sponsors to sustain our current operations and support our future growth while keeping costs to our members very low.
• Participation: getting more members involved in the organization through volunteerism and leverage that involvement to help steer the chapter and grow future agile leaders.
• Speakers: maintaining of pipeline of speaker candidates both locally and nationally to bring our members a variety of fresh ideas and perspectives on the ever changing world of agility, agile organizations and agile leadership.

While various members of the leadership team will lead these efforts, each of them need a volunteer or two to rev up the speed boat in order to make some good progress. If any of these sound interesting to you contact us today at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

All in all we had a very productive afternoon, growing closer as a team and charting the continuing path for APLN Houston's evolution.

-- Robbie Mac Iver