English class

Lecture 2: Listening Skills

Presented by

Dr. Muthanna .H.Dawood

Read and Translate
Project management can be a messy business. You can plan, but you can’t
really predict all the challenges and obstacles that will come up. So on every
project, and especially in agile project management, you have to learn and adapt
as you go along. And at the end, it’s a good idea to discuss what you’ve learned
in a project debrief meeting. If you’re following an agile approach, you might
also hold sprint retrospectives, which are like mini-debriefs at the end of each
sprint. Whether it’s a project debrief or one of these sprint retrospectives, you’ll
cover similar topics.

A project debrief meeting might start out with a review of the project goals.
You want to look back and see what you set out to do in the first place. Then
you can talk about successes during the project. What did you do well? What
would you do again? From there, you can move on to discuss mistakes, and
what you’d like to change in the future. And finally, you’ll want to summarize
everything that you’ve learned. The whole idea, of course, is that you’ll be able
to do things better next time.

In today’s dialog, we’ll hear a project manager named Martin, who’s running a
debrief meeting at the end of a software development project. We’ll also hear
Jill and Sumita, two of the engineers who’ve worked on the project. Together,
the group is discussing the work they’ve done and what they’ve learned.

Listening Questions
1. After discussing the project goals, what does Martin ask about?
2. The discussion of mistakes leads Martin to ask a related question about what
topic?
3. What does Martin do at the end of the meeting?