systems thinking « Thinking for a Change

Sep

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

Lean Product Development at Lean & Kanban Belgium 2010

Parallel evolution

Last Thursday and Friday I participated in the Lean and Kanban Belgium 2010 conference. I was scheduled to present a session on Friday morning, so I could go to many sessions on Thursday.

Every session that I attended on Thursday said many things I wanted to say:

Sandrine Olivencia talked about challenging the team for continuous improvement
Dave Nicolette talked about the dysfunctions around budgeting and the need for IT to integrate, not align, with the value stream
Anthony Marcano and Andy Palmer explained how analysis can be implemented as a pull system
Ryan Shriver essentially said all I wanted to say about finding the real goals of our users and quantifying their needs
John Seddon told tales about really understanding value demand and taking a systems thinking approach to the design of work in his usual, inimitable style

What was left to say? At the end of the day I could scrap about 3/4 of my talk. The good news is that many people are independently reporting that these techniques and approaches work. And they can show results.

In the end, there was more than enough to fill an hour. After the presentation several people asked questions and discussed what I presented.

p.s. I followed Dave Nicolette‘s advice to grow a profitable consultancy: coin a new acronym. I give you “IDD”. You’ll have to watch the presentation to know what it means. And you’ll have to pay me big bucks to come implement it in your organisation 🙂

Lean out your backlog – Lean and Kanban Belgium 2010

View more presentations from AgileCoach.net.

Sep

I often wonder why…

So many companies I’ve worked with succeed in delivering products or services every day, even though it requires the coordination of thousands or even tens of thousands of people. They do it well enough that I’m suprised, annoyed and angry when they don’t deliver.

And yet they can’t manage to deliver simple IT projects taking a few months and requiring the coordination of only a few tens of people.

What am I missing?

Sep

Conflict Resolution at Mini SPA 2010

Portia and I presented a tutorial on how to use the “Conflict Resolution Diagram” systems thinking tool at the Mini SPA conference in London on September 10th 2010.

The slides of the presentation and summaries of the systems thinking tools are available on the agilecoach site.

Let us know if these tools gave you ideas to resolve some conflicts in your life.

Jul

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!

Thinking for a Change

Categories

Blogroll