Today

I spent the better part of today in a non-work meeting. I've been having more of these lately than... well more than the none I had before, so it's infinitely more. Today's was tied to a group of people who are interested in doing agile software development for non-profits. This becomes even more interesting when you understand that the group is comprised of people from the BayAPLN (which I attend). The acronym stands for Agile Project Leadership Network. The translation is that I'm usually one of two or three developers/engineers, and everyone else is a project manager or a program manger, or is somehow removed from the coding part of the development process.

What threw me for a loop in the chartering meeting today was that overwhelingly, this group of nineish project leaders and one engineer (me) said it wanted this new organization to offer development as it's primary service.  Going in, I had expected this group to say that its primary service was to help non-profits develop a better process for delivering value through the use of Agile and occasionally using software as a vehicle for that goal.

So now I feel very cautious. I still think that this can work out to be the volunteer opportunity I wanted, but, it is going to take some additional effort on my part to ensure that the worker to manager ratio is balanced. Which translates to me going in to work and asking people to volunteer. Which means I have to do some growing before Monday.