Thinking for a Change at SPA 2006

Thinking for a Change at SPA 2006

Marc Evers and I will host a session on the Theory of Constraints’ “Thinking Processes” at the SPA 2006 conference.

The session is, not coincidentally, called “Thinking for a Change”, after the Thinking Processes book by Lisa Scheinkopf, that introduced me to the subject.

We will introduce “current reality trees”, “transition trees” and “future reality trees” by applying them to real problems that participants bring to the session. We will be “learning by doing” by taking small steps: explain part of the technique, apply the technique, reflect, explain another part…

We don’t have the time to deal with the “Evaporating Cloud” technique during the session, but we will run a “birds of a feather” session about it. The previous entry contains an example of the use of the evaporating cloud. Expect more examples of the techniques in upcoming entries.

The conference takes place in St Neots, Bedfordshire, from 26 to 29 March.

Some of the interesting sessions of the conference:

• These are some of my favourite tools by Willem van den Ende and Marc Evers invites participants to bring in and share their favourite tools. These don’t have to be physical, technical tools… Willem and Marc probably prefer them not to be.
• Planning and tracking security requirements by Johan Peeters explores the use of “Abuser stories” to explore and plan security requirements.
• Designing metrics for agile process improvement by Jason Gorman and Duncan Pierce lets participants design, test and refine metrics. I attended this session at the London XP Days. It’s a fun learning experience. You’ll never look at metrics the same way again.
• Jidoka in software Development by Kevin Rutherford explores the application of “Jidoka” from the Toyota Way to software development. I attended this session at the Benelux XP Days.

See you there!