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Tuesday
Norm Kerth’s keynote looking back on 5 years of Retrospectives wasn’t surprising if you read the book or performed retrospectives. Many (most?) people in the audience have done or want to do retrospectives. Norm gave a great overview of Retrospectives and the results he and other retrospective facilitators have achieved. Performing retrospectives is good for the health of your team, the results of your project and your career. A simple and effective way to improve your process is the only thing you really need in your process. Everything else you need, will be introduced if and when you need.
An interesting and fun session about Product Managers. In the workshop we looked back at experiences with Product Managers. From these experiences, we determined what a product manager needs to do and what qualities we’re looking for. It is a very difficult job, juggling all those (possibly conflicting) demands.
Clarke Ching just wrote a blog entry about a book on “Agile Product Development”. Maybe worth checking out.
After a nice walk in very windy St Neots, off to Richard Mitchell’s session on modeling with views. Instead of making one big domain model, Richard creates smaller models, specifically for one (type of) domain specialist. He can then combine them in one, consistent model.
We talked a bit more about the theory of constraints and its application in software development. And then it’s time for the traditional last evening diversion. This year we had a wine and cheese tasting. Most people seemed to prefer the wine to last year’s Belgian beer. Apparently, Geuze Lambic is an acquired taste…
Wednesday
First, get some work done: handle registrations for Agile Open. If you want to attend, don’t wait to long to register, because we limit the number of participants to 40.
I’m looking forward to Dave Thomas’ keynote. “Cargo Cults and Angry Monkeys” sounds very interesting.
Read more at http://www.spaconference.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
Tags: Systems Thinking, agile, SPA 2006, Theory of Constraints, Thinking Processes
Sunday
Attended a workshop on Use Cases. The audience contained both use case users and sceptics, which resulted in some heated discussion. Not unusual for an SPA session. I did get some useful ideas to apply at work.
The day ended with a barbecue and drinks sponsored by Cincom, who valiantly keep on making, selling and using Smalltalk. One day, when I grow up, I want to do a real Smalltalk project again.
Monday
Marc Evers and I hosted the “Thinking for a Change” session this morning. The session went well: 3 out of 4 participants were able to find the root cause of their problem AND come up with some useful things to do about it. The problems were quite diverse:
- a software development coach having trouble communicating and working with the managers of the team
- having a good balance between home life and work
- how to reduce the spiraling costs of change in an application
- a business struggling to find enough money to survive the next few months, until their product is out.
In the evening we did a “Birds of a Feather” session on evaporating clouds. Again, two very different cases. One of them got to a start of a conclusion; the other managed to uncover a whole set of assumptions. To really resolve it, both parties would need to go through the exercise, to get a better understanding of the other party’s position, reasoning and assumptions.
In the bar, after dinner and drinks, I joined another group making a Current Reality Tree and a Future Reality Tree. Today was a Thinking Processes day.
Tags: Systems Thinking, agile, SPA 2006, Theory of Constraints, Thinking Processes
Retrospectives in enemy territory
You know retrospectives are good for you. But what if you can’t hold a “real” retrospective? There could be many reasons:
- We don’t have any time
- We don’t feel safe
- We don’t do silly, fluffy stuff like that
- We don”t need to improve any more
Do you give up? No, that’s the kind of situation where you really need a retrospective.
Undercover retrospectives
Don’t organize retrospectives.
- Find some excuse to have a celebration. The end of a release or iteration. Two weeks without a build failure… Use your imagination
- Go out and get coffee and pastries. Or soft drinks and pizza. Take away Chinese…. Be creative
- Invite the team members, your customer, system engineers who put your software into productions, DBAs who nurse your precious data, people from other teams who helped you get to this success. Thank them for making the reason for the party happen.
- Now comes the devious bit. Get people talking about what went right. Ask them “If you could change one thing, what would it be?”. Ask them if they would like to research something new. Make mental notes of what people say (I don’t recommend alcohol at the celebration: you’re unlikely to remember what was said, the next day).
- Make it happen. Implement the suggestions; start research. By the next celebration, everyone will be pleasantly surprised that you listened to them and took their ideas seriously.
Try it! It doesn’t cost a lot of time and money, but it does wonders to your team.
Tags: Retrospective, Agile
The night before
At the end of the first day, we had dinner on a boat touring on the Seine. I didn’t see much of the scenery, because we had a lot of animated discussion about Lean, Theory of Constraints, agility, books, dysfunctional organisations…
After that, we went for a (Belgian!) beer, where the conversation turned towards less serious subjects.
Friday morning
Start bright and early, because I have to present two “one minute presentations”: each session organizer explains in less than one minute why people should attend their session. I advertised my Toyota Way session and Johan Peeters’ Agile Security session, because Johan arrived “just in time” for the start of his session.
The Toyota Way session was in the first slot of the morning. Things were going well, I rarely stumbled speaking French and the audience seemed interested. Shortly before the end, we lost power. No more beamer. The audience self-organized to solve the problem: my portable (running on batteries) was put on a chair on the table, which allowed most people to see what’s on screen. Luckily, I used a “Takahashi” style presentation, with large fonts and big images.
After the presentation, I had reserved half an hour for questions and remarks. There were a lot of questions, lots of discussion, so it seems the presentation piqued people’s interest.
CMMi vs Agile
I’m currently attending a “CMMi vs Agile” debate. Hmmmm… there’s that “vs” word again. I feel an “Evaporating Cloud” coming on.
Day one of the first French XP Days
A brief train ride and I arrive in Paris, to be met by Christophe Thibaut, Marc Evers and Willem van den Ende. Off to the “Centre Hamelin”.
Laurent Bossavit opened the first French XP Days. Charlie Poole presented a brief keynote about “Extreme Value”. He urges us to understand the business and to explain (and show!) how we generate value. This is an interesting subject, but I would have liked to see a longer, more in-depth session. Charlie and some audience members mentioned something I’ve also experienced: it’s easy to speak about the value of XP/whatever you do with the top people. These people are used to making decisions about value, cost, investment and risk. Nothing extreme there: more value sooner; lower cost and risk; more control. It’s the “managers in the middle” that are harder to deal with. What are they motivated by; what do they want; what’s their problem? Answers on a post card…
Retours d’experiences
I’m attending the “retour d’experiences” (experience reports) track. In the other rooms, there’s a refactoring session and the “Leadership Game” session by Yves and Ignace Hanoulle.
What’s the common theme running through all these experiences? These are ordinary people, doing ordinary IT projects in ordinary companies. They’ve encountered problems. They have used agile methods. Some things have improved; most things have improved considerably. There are still problems to be overcome, but they like where they are now. They’ve come a long way and know that they will have to keep going further.
Another common element is “fun”. These people are passionate and love their jobs. Like in the case of Ardatis, they report that one of the indicators that they’re doing well is that teammembers are happy, that customers and users are happy.
Let there be pudding!
That’s the kind of real-world down-to-earth story that we need to get out at events and conferences like the Benelux XP Day. Whiz-bang, super-cool consultanty type things are fun and interesting. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let there be lots of pudding!
It’s great to hear all of those success stories. But my inner sceptic wonders if this is due to selection bias? Who’s going to present a story of how they used agile techniques and failed? (Update: J.B. Rainsberger did exactly that: see the day 2 entry).
I’d like to hear such stories. I’d like to discuss such stories: what has gone wrong, what could have been done differently, what have we learned for our next project?
Call me
Who’s got a succesful agile project? Contact me. Come and tell us about it at a user group meeting, an open space conference or an XP Day.
Who’s got a failed agile project? Contact me. Let’s put together an interesting session a user group meeting, an open space conference or an XP Day.
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