A Process Blast From the Past

I had a chance yesterday to present principles around the MAT to some people from a large organization.

It was fun. I hadn't had the MAT material out in a long while, so I was almost as fresh to the topic as the team was. The neat part was preparing -- very easy to prepare for something in which you built a business plan, filed for a patent, and spent a year trying to market!

In fact, it's a bit of an anniversary. I started this blog 3 years ago with the partial intention of using it to help market the MAT. (If you don't know what the MAT is, it's a way for teams to self-assess what is going right and wrong and report that information up to the enterprise level so it can be fixed. It's real-world agile metrics.)

So it was a blast. My presentation (I thought) was quick, to the point, and not as boring as the old ones. I gave up trying to sell the MAT a wihle back -- it just seemed like I didn't move in the right circles to help it get moving. Plus my direct software sales skills just aren't what they need to be. So I'm just happy to have invented the thing and to be able to share the ideas with friends.

Interestingly enough, I think being away from a topic -- especially one you have invested so much time, money, and emotion in -- helps you be a better presenter than when you're swimming around in it. At least from my personal experience, I tend to get defensive when I think people are calling my baby ugly. I think that's one more reason to have more than one founder if possible.

If you're interested in seeing the new material, drop me an email and I'll send over the Powerpoint.