|
|
XP Days Benelux, 23-24 November in Mechelen, Belgium
It’s time to start planning for the fall and winter conference season. As an organiser, the 7th XP Days Benelux is top of my list.
We’re finalising what looks like a great program with several sessions I want to go to in each time slot. With five tracks covering all things agile, there should be ample choice for you and our conference personas too.
We can’t show you the program yet, but you can register for the conference. Who would register for a conference without knowing what’s on the program? Lots of people it seems, as registrations are coming in steadily.
Now, that’s T-R-U-S-T, one of the essential Agile Values.
 Bram goes to every XP Days Benelux Innovation and constraints
How did we come up with the idea of registering before announcing the program? By accident.
- Participant: “Can I get a conference ticket now? I’ll be abroad the next few weeks and I want to be sure to get in.”
- Organisers: “But, don’t you want to see the program first, before deciding?”
- Participant: “No, I’ve been to last year’s conference. I trust you’ll have a great program this year too.”
There was nothing holding us back from selling tickets before announcing the program. We only had this self-imposed constraint: “participants want to see the program before deciding to participate”. It turns out that this isn’t a real constraint after all. Part of innovation is letting go of those self-imposed constraints. Another part is dealing with real constraints.
How many of those self-imposed constraints do you have in your work or your life? How many times have you said “I didn’t know we could do that!” ? How often do you ask yourself “What would happen if we tried this?”
That’s why I like organising XP Days Benelux: there are always people coming up with crazy ideas, trying something new and improving it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. We always try to learn. We always try to question. We don’t always succeed, but at least we try.
Try this at home
Note how often you hear this:
- That’ll never work!
- They won’t let us do that!
- That will never happen here!
- Yes, but…
- There’s no budget for that!
- That’s just silly!
- or any other Idea Killer
Now, take one of these instances and instead of shooting the idea down, start looking at the hidden self-imposed constraints:
- It’ll never work? In what circumstances would it work?
- They won’t let us do that? Why? Have we asked?
- That will never happen here! Where would it work? What would it take to transform here into a place where it works?
- Yes, but…? Yes, and…!
- There’s no budget for that! What small part of this could we do for free? How much value could we create? Could we use that value to fund the next small step?
- That’s just silly! Less silly than what we do today 🙂
It just takes a bit of courage. Try something, one small step. Collaborate with people who can help you. Get regular feedback to improve. Instead of “doing agile” (or worse, trying to get others to “do agile”), be agile.
You are an innovator. You are creative. It’s as simple as that.
Come to XP Days Benelux to see what crazy stuff we’ve cooked up this year. If some people get their way, it might involve dancing, martial arts, art and philantropy. Now, that’s just plain silly! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Persona created with Janina Köppel’s South Park Studio.
 Scrum Simulation
I met Michael Sahota at Agile 2009. Gino Marckx, fellow Toronto agilist, recommended I talked with him.
Michael has created a Scrum simulation based on the XP Game. I regularly get asked if there’s a Scrum equivalent of the XP Game. I’m sure there must be, but this is the first one that I know of that’s published. If you know of any other published, free games let me know.
What I like is:
- One hand drawn overview of the whole process and game. Portia does something similar when she plays the XP Game: one poster with a post-it figure moving from step to step as the team progresses through the game. The poster remains in the team workspace as a handy reminder of the process.
- Making the backlog visible with a story board.
- Changes are republished with a Creative Commons license.
Agile Tour Toronto
I had more discussions with Toronto agilists Peter Yu and Syrous Delavari from Intelliware. Gino, Michael and the guys from Intelliware organise Agile Tour Toronto on October 20th. I won’t be able to attend. If you’re in the neighbourhood of Toronto around then, don’t miss this event. It’s sure to be fun and interesting.
Agile 2009 roundup
I already wrote up the different sessions I attended:
Time to do a conference retrospective.
What Went Well
- Chicago (at least the part I saw) is a pleasant mix of big city with plenty of green and lake
- The Art Institute, Field Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art provided several hours of stunning and interesting exhibits. After some searching, I got to see Nighthawks up close
- Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield by George Schlitz and Giora Morein gave me a new tool to think about agile enablement in large organisations
- Several analysis sessions in the program shows that we’re interested in finding out out what value our projects can deliver
- Useful leadership and facilitation tools from Steve “Doc” Smith and Chris Avery
- Flirting tips from Ole Jepsen and Jenni Dow to connect better at work
- Lots of games for innovation, push/pull, kanban
- Meeting other participants in the sessions, over breakfast, lunch and dinner and going out for drinks
- Story telling as a coaching, consulting and retrospective tool
- Playing two parallel bottleneck games and seeing happy participants who’ve learned useful techniques while having fun
- The facilities staff were very helpful and thorough helping us to rearrange the room for the bottleneck game. A nicely self-organising team in action.
- The event organisers provided us with rapid feedback: the feedback forms were scanned and emailed to us only a few hours after each session.
What Went Wrong
- We accepted too many players for the Business Value Game, which made it very difficult to come to consensus in each group and made for a noisy and messy session
- The hurried banquet and too long closing keynote
- Too many sessions, especially those about analysis, that consisted of only the presenter talking without any participant interaction or activity. I thought analysis was about listening, involving people and discovering what they value?
- Not being able to meet everyone I’d like to talk with
- Missed the PMI Agile meeting at the Thoughtworks office
Puzzles
- When are we going to stop those blanket dismissals like “project managers are useless, they should all become scrum masters”, “PMI is non-agile”, “we don’t need analysts, they’ll only lead to lots of useless documentation and paralysis”, “lean is bad because it’s production”, “powerpoint presentations are bad”, “Scrum is evil”, “Kanban is stupid”. Let’s grow up a bit and realise that we’re all fighting against bad project management, bad analysis, bad presentations and unprofessional software development.
- Are Portia and I typecast as “games makers and players”? We also submitted presentations, but the reviewers seemed to prefer “fun games” above “boring presentations”. Presentations don’t have to be boring. I had hoped Jared Spool would prove that, but he spoiled it by taking too much time. Come and see us present the “Toyota Way” presentation at Scandinavian Agile and XP Days Benelux
- What is Agile and where is it going? At the conference we see lots of aspects of Agile in a very fragmented view. What is it that we all have in common? What makes us different from professional engineers?
Learnt
- Less is more. The Bottleneck Game went very well because we limited the scope. There’s so much we could tell about the Theory of Constraints and its consequences. The Business Value Game flopped because we didn’t limit the number of participants and because there are too many elements in the game
- The importance of (business) analysis becomes clearer, as the old techniques help us to discover and define value. Without it, there can be no value-driven work. I’ve been applying agile analysis for years, but it’s only recently that I’ve become consciously competent again and can teach it to others.
- Shorter sessions are useful to get presenters to focus on one idea and present that clearly. And it allows me to apply “the law of two feet” more easily. I’m going to try to make some more focused games and simulations, so that I can explain one concept fully and let participants experience it, in a short session.
Another session about Business Analysis. I recognise a lot of the tools and the presenter uses a similar approach to mine: derive required capabilities from the business value drivers.
However, like most of the other analysis sessions, there was too much talking and not enough listening or doing. There was no participant interaction, just a long, monotone discourse.
Olla let the participants see the difference between Push and Pull scheduling, first with examples from his past flipping burgers, then with a simple simulation. We had to work together to fold paper airplanes. This time I was the lucky player who got to be the bottleneck. We then told each other about similar situations in our work life. Most of the stories were about integration testing being the bottleneck.
Participants liked the pull system better: less waste, less stress, better quality.
I’ve sent Olla a complete perfection game about the session, but here are some of the highlights:
To make it perfect
- Use an example that is “pure push”, not the mixture of push and pull used at McDonalds
- Explain the advantages and drawbacks of each method
- Link push and pull to IT, to help participants see the connection
- How do we proceed if we want to install a pull system?
Tsutomo contacted me before the conference to exchange game development ideas and I met him and his Japanese friends at the Thoughtworks office. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the session because I wanted to take part in the two sessions described above. I only got to see the end of the game, but the game seemed to be a success: participants were really involved and they got better insights into Kanban. Tsutomo got some good feedback to improve the game. The game is published on Tsutomo’s site. I hope to see this game again, improved with player feedback.
Closing
Thursday evening’s banquet set a speed record: one dish had only just been served or the waiters asked if they could remove the plate and plunk the next dish on the table. In contrast, Jared Spool’s closing keynote, although entertaining and informative, set a length record. What with all the announcements, people were fidgeting to leave. The evening ended with a few drinks and lots of discussion of agile, lean and organisations.
I didn’t participate in Friday’s open space sessions, just said goodbye to a few people. After a breakfast meeting and a visit to the Museum of Modern Art came the long flights back to Belgium. Another Agile200x has gone. Next year’s conference will be in Nashville, Tennessee, home of Country music 🙂
|
