Dec
22

Play 4 Agile 2011

Play4Agile provides an open playground

to inspire each other and

to learn how using serious games can help us achieve our goals

I’ll attend the Play 4 Agile open space conference in Frankfurt, Germany from February 18th to 21st. I expect to learn more about creating and facilitating learning experiences. And have fun too, of course!

Follow @play4agile or #p4a11 to see what new games come out of the conference.

Sep
28

Usergroup meeting 26/10/2010

XP Day session tryout: Agreeing on Business Value with Systems Thinking

Cap Gemini will host the next Agile/XP Belgium usergroup meeting. This session is a tryout for XP Days Benelux.

We talk a lot about “maximizing business value”. We ask business people and product managers to prioritise by estimating the business value of user stories. But what exactly do we mean by business value?

Over the past few years we’ve worked with many teams to define their “Business Value Model”, a clear definition of the value a project will bring to the organisation. The exercise hasn’t always been easy but it has always brought significant benefits:

  • Measurable business value in units that impact the organization (such as revenue €€€, customer satisfaction, staff retention)
  • Everybody involved was more motivated because there was a clear reason for the project and they finally understood what it was
  • The whole team was aligned around one vision because we had clear criteria to define success
  • We came up with more innovative solutions because everybody on the team, not only “the business” or “product managers/owners” could take product-related decisions based on the model
  • We could deliver a lot faster than anybody expected because the Business Value Model allowed us to easily distinguish between value-adding and non-value-adding features
  • We spent a lot less time writing and prioritising user stories because we were able to derive the user stories from the value definitions
  • The Business Value Model guided us to explore new product ideas: the business value model was a hypothesis that we could test and refine each time we released or performed user testing.

In this interactive tutorial you’ll apply some Systems Thinking techniques, such as the Diagram of Effects and Intermediate Objectives Map) to define the business value model of an example project. We’ll show you the techniques we used and discuss how you can apply those techniques in you context so that you’ll be ready to start building a business value model with your team.

Agenda:

  • 18:00 – 19:00 – Welcome with snacks and drinks
  • 19:00 – 21:00 – Session

Address: Bessenveldstraat 19, B-1831 Diegem, Belgium

Register here for this free event

Sep
27

XP Days Benelux 2010

XP Days Benelux 2010 will be held in Kapellerput, Heeze (near Eindhoven), The Netherlands on 25-26 November

The program for XP Days Benelux has been published. This year we have more sessions than ever before: 41 sessions over 2 days. As always, it’s going to be hard to select only one session from the five parallel tracks.

I’ll be presenting “Agreeing on Business Value with Systems Thinking” with Portia Tung. I’ll be doing a tryout of this presentation, which has been updated after presenting it at Agile 2010. Come to the Agile/XP Belgium user group meeting on Tuesday 26th of October.

If you want to see a tryout of the “Database Change Management” session, join us in the Agile/XP Belgium user group meeting on Tuesday 5th of October.

Sep
26

Usergroup meeting 05/10/2010

XP Days session tryout

IHC hosts the next Agile/XP Belgium usergroup meeting. There will be two sessions in parallel

Session 1: “A journey into Database Change Management” by Jochen Jonckheere and Pascal Mestdach. This is a tryout for XP Days Benelux.

Abstract:

We will bring you the story of our journey into database change management. We share our experiences with concrete examples/common situations and explain the different parts of Database Change Management along the way. During our journey we encountered several problems. We let participants reflect on how they would solve these problems, before we show the solution we picked. This is an interactive technical session where you will see 2 developers working together, writing some small sql scripts, breaking and fixing automated builds and even in the end a tool for handling Database Change Management in an automated way in the .NET environment.

Session 2: To be decided

Agenda:

  • 18:00 – 19:00 – Welcome with snacks and drinks
  • 19:00 – 21:00 – Parallel Sessions

Register here for this free meeting.

Address: Legeweg 157 E/02, 8020 Oostkamp, Belgium

Jul
31

Mini SPA 2010

Solve Conflicts without Compromise at Mini SPA 2010

Portia and I have been invited to re-run the “Solve Conflicts without Compromise” session from SPA 2010 at Mini SPA 2010 on Friday September 10th. In the SPA session, participants used the Conflict Resolution Diagram to explore four real-world conflicts brought by the participants. I really liked doing the session, because the participants could really try out the tool and four participants got some ideas to solve some important conflict in their work and life.

Two features of the session were crucial to its success: we had plenty of time (3 hours) and a limited number of participants (20). Neither of those conditions will be true at Mini SPA. Therefore, we’ve had to apply some systems thinking tools to ensure that the session still delivers the benefits.

Check out the programme of Mini SPA: it features 6 of the most liked sessions of the SPA conference in two tracks. The conference is free, but you need to register. Don’t wait too long, places are limited.

See you in London!

Solve conflicts without compromise