Lean Coffee is one of my favourite ways of learning. It's a forum that brings diverse experience to the table on how lean or agile practices, principles and values are applied. The Melbourne West-End CBD Lean Coffee kicked off January 2014 in the Guildford Lane cafe - Krimper. The Lean Coffee Framework is really simple for anyone to follow;

Prepare: 1. Cards or stickies 2. Textas or Pens 3. Timer 4. Location where you can chat & hear each other

Kick-off: 1. Always good to do a round table of introductions to break the ice 2. Create your Kanban wall 3. Give people time to write down topics they would like discuss to create the backlog

Prioritise Backlog: Often groups will take a dot vote on topics.We went for blind vote - that is you can't see what everyone else is voting for, much like planning poker 1. Number each card 2. Ask people to pick the most important topic they would like to discuss first 3. On the count of three, everyone shows their number they voted for (we used fingers rather than writing the # to save paper) 4. Order your top items according to what people prefer

Get Chatting: 1. Set the timer to 5 minutes and get chatting 2. When the time goes off, everyone gives a thumbs indication whether they would like to continue on this topic - thumbs up impartial to stopping or continuing - thumbs horizontal stop this topic and pick the next - thumbs down

Enjoy! Often you'll find the conversation can digress into another topic. It's good as a facilitator to keep an eye on this and ask the 'digressor' to pop down the topic for the next backlog prioritisation.

Want more information on Lean Coffee - visit the founders site for more instructions on Lean Coffee Format.