Thinking for a Change

Another XP Day!

XP Days branches out: our French-speaking Swiss friends organise the first XP Day Switzerland in Geneva on Monday March 30th, 2009.

The conference is a good opportunity for me to return to Geneva and see some of the local Agilists again. I’ve got great memories of the conference center, where I presented the Toyota Way and the participants discussed Toyota, Lean and Agile into the night. I’m looking forward to go for a run along the lake.

The conference program has been published at http://www.xpday.ch. The detailed descriptions aren’t available yet, but judging from the subjects and the speakers, this looks to be another fun and interesting XP Day.

Another new session!

One of the proposals Portia and I sent in got accepted. For the occasion, we’ve developed a new session: “Les Cinq premiers pas pour devenir vraiment agile”. In this interactive presentation, the audience gets to try out 5 “tools” we use when coaching teams that are new to agile. They can immediately put these tools into practice during the conference day.

I’m really looking forward to this session. If it all works out, this will be both fun and useful. The session is scheduled at the start of the conference because it also serves as an ice-breaker. We might be able to reuse parts of this session for other occasions. Like the one that will be announced soon…

More XP Days news

Watch this space for more exciting XP Day news soon…

Business Value in London

Vera, Portia and I will play the Business Value Game at the annual Software Practice Advancement conference. This year’s edition will be in London from 5 to 8 April 2009.

If you haven’t played it yet, this game lets you play in a team of account managers who have to prioritise a portfolio of projects for their development team. To win, you have to make difficult business decisions:

• Which project goes first?
• Do I start many projects at once or do I focus on one project?
• Do I focus on revenue or customer happiness?
• Can I afford to lose that customer? Can I afford to keep that customer?
• Do I invest in process and productivity?
• How do I deal with variance in performance?

In the beginning, the game is very easy. In each iteration we add another twist so that by the end of the game, the players are juggling loads of projects and customers while dealing with unreliable developers who want new tools. Many developers came out of this game with increased respect for the account and product managers in their company 🙂

It’s instructive and lots of fun. If you don’t believe me, ask Laurent Morisseau and the other participants of Agile Open France.

But in the real world…

Of course, the real world is always a bit more difficult than a simulation. After the game, we run a workshop where the participants look at how they can apply the game’s ideas to a range of circumstances: product development, many small projects, large projects, support and maintenance…

See you there if you want to generate more value.