2018-11-15 Meeting notes

• See table (below)
• As per the email, Mary Jo has reallocated $45k of the Travel Funds to Team Parrot from Jan - March
• Budget-wise, we have only rough budget utilization data (see below). Brandon estimates we are near the 50% mark. Hopefully once finalized in a month or so, we will have a clear picture if our current Gap budget carries us through March.

• Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) to provide projections for the Dec meeting
• Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) to send an email with financial update

• Update: Craig is not attending the Zambia meetings
  • Brandon raised the idea of asking Zambia team if we can record or take pictures of the site visit if we want to make a virtual site visit so those who cannot attend could see what it is like in the facility. Improve the transparency of "what it is like to use the system and what their daily life is like".
• (Reviewed last month's meeting notes about our roles in Zambia. See Zambia travel section of 2018-10-18 Meeting notes)

Short-term 3.6 Planning Tasks

• Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated), Ashraf, Sam Im (Deactivated), Wesley Brown, Josh Zamor to meet to ensure there is alignment on who is doing what for 3.6 for features and interface workstreams. Wesley Brown to schedule meeting.
• Craig Appl (Unlicensed) and Clay Crosby (Unlicensed) to meet in early November to scope 3.6 and define objectives for in-person meeting in Zambia. Invite Wesley Brown and Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) to join.

• Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) waiting on PATH to process the contract. I think we can begin reviewing extensions for our contracts.
• Mary Jo will ask about putting contracts with a later date than March to give us space.
• VR will send out extensions for your review.

October (Sprint 109 & 110) Gap Project Review

• Team Feedback:
  • Team Ona: Sprint 110 we focused on the OAuth process and unlocked success for sprint 111
  • Team JSI: Sprint 109 we were waiting on QA and now shifted our approaches to ensure that doesn't happen again.
  • Team MTG: Sprint 109 was small due to carry over into Sprint 110, and we were focusing on creating/designing work for Sprint 110. Identified this in the retro and renewed practices for 110.
• Overall Thoughts (Wes): improve communication between teams. We have two meetings Monday and Friday.  Friday is a live call and Monday is a slack check in. Aim to improve communicating "blocked" items across teams. Improving the scoping of tickets to ensure they can be closed (breaking things down further). GOAL is to even out the peaks and valleys.
  • Ashraf: agrees, yes this is what we are working on.
  • Matt: integrating with external tools has been challenging since we cannot always anticipate the hurdles since we don't control the external tools.
  • Edward: the management overhead is much larger than we had anticipated.
  • Wes: do you have thoughts on how to approve on ^
  • Mary Jo: the balance of management cost to value of multiple teams. How do we evaluate the value and cost in a way we can communicate and form an opinion about what we want to do in the future.
  • Edward: are there ways to structure the work for more efficiency? Let's think through that and there may be more ways. No specifics at this point but we should think about it further.
  • Wes: We've been doing it in a way where we are trying to build capacity all teams at the same time. Rather than specializing teams in an area. 
  • Edward: if that is a goal, building a team's capacities across the system, are there other ways to achieve that with less collaborative overhead.
  • Brandon: Here is an idea from left field: For staff in Africa-Europe timezones, they could even do a daily 10-minute stand-up meeting on Slack or Zoom. It would not include any US folks, but it would help unlock coordination and dependencies between all teams members based in Africa-Europe. Wes comment: That’s a good idea… I could even help facilitate that more easily once I am *finally* back in Kenya.

• Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) add this to Zambia meeting plans to continue this conversation in-person.