xpday « Thinking for a Change

Mar

Les cinq premiers pas pour devenir vraiment agile

Les cinq premiers pas…

Aujourd’hui, Portia et moi présentons une nouvelle session, “Les cinq premiers pas pour devenir agile” au XP Day Suisse à Geneve. C’est une présentation courte et interactive (les participants jouent 5 jeux) qui introduit cinq “outils” que nous utilisons quand nous commencons à travailler avec une équipe.

Plus de nouvelles après le congrès.

Cinq outils… et plus

Si vous voulez apprendre ces cinq outils et plein d’autres pour aider votre équipe a réaliser plus de résultats, devenir plus agile et s’amuser plus, la formation “Agile en Pratique” de Zenika est toute faite pour vous.

Vous aimeriez appliquer les méthodes agiles. Comment les appliquer dans votre équipe, sur votre projet ? Comment faire la transition vers les méthodes agiles? Cette formation répond à toutes ces questions. A travers des exercices, des jeux et des simulations vous expérimenterez les techniques agiles. Vous saurez comment, pourquoi et quand les appliquer afin d’améliorer la qualité du résultat et du travail de votre équipe.

Rendez-vous les 21 et 22 Avril à Paris!

The five first steps to become really agile

Portia and I present the “Five first steps to become really agile” at the Swiss XP Day. This new session presents five simple “tools” that we use when we start to work with a new team.

This is the first session that we developed first in french. We’ll translate it in English and do a tryout soon. Then we’ll publish the session on our Agile Coach site with the other games we’ve made.

More about the session when it’s published.

Jan

Kaizen in Paris

$Dorothy et le Magicien d\'Oz$ A lean evening

Yesterday evening I was back in Paris to give a presentation about “Lean and the Toyota Way“. As I walked from the train station to the offices of Zenika, I came across a large billboard announcing “Dorothy et le magicien d’Oz”. It’s reassuring to see that the fairytales are alive and well.

My friends at Zenika had arranged a nice place and provided some fine drinks and snacks. More than 100 people showed up, among them many of the French Agilistas. I chatted for a while with them about agile, lean and the upcoming XP Days France.

And then it was time to start the presentation. The auditorium was almost completely full.

The Toyota Way

The presentation explained the 14 principles of The Toyota Way of Managing and the many parallels with Agile methods. As I go through the principles I illustrate them with stories from projects I’ve worked on. Each time I do this presentation it changes, as I learn more and discover more great ideas in Lean.

There were some great questions and discussions:

“What can I do to introduce more Lean and Agile in my organisation?” – Apply the principles and values, set an example. Support and collaborate with others who apply these values.
“Are there any incompatibilities between Lean and XP?” – None that I can see.
“For Agile and Lean transformations to succeed we need support from management and workers. Often, we only have support from one of them.”
“Lean coaches are very direct, not afraid of saying it as it is to management. Is that something they’re taught?” – It does seem so, judging from the documentary Kenji Hiranabe showed at Agile 2008, where a Lean coach almost made a factory manager cry by bluntly pointing out all the flaws in the production line.
“Does Lean make you lose weight?” – A Gemba Walk a day helps 🙂

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for drinks afterwards because I had to rush to catch the last train back to Brussels. The next day I had another team to coach, another opportunity to “Develop exceptional people and teams”, the tenth principle of the Toyota Way.

I hope to see the participants again soon. See you at the XP Days France or a Zenika training session.

A bientôt!

What others say

Jean-Claude Grosjean summarizes the principles and contrasts them with the 7 principles of Lean Software Development and Agile.

Nicolas Martignole wrote a very extensive report on each of the principles and relates Lean, Scrum and XP.

Claude Aubry thinks “Obeya” is more beautiful than “War Room”. I fully agree. He currently tries to recreate the Obeya experience for an offshore team.

Thank you for the rapid and very detailed feedback!

Dec

Real Options in the Real World

Real Options?

This Friday, Portia and I will present the “Real Options Space Game” at XP Days London. This strategy board game set in space allows players to experiment with Real Options concepts.

Real Options is a tool to optimize decisions: it helps us to consider and manage more possibilities and gives us more time to gather information, so that our decisions are better informed. The basic ideas are taken from financial options, but have been widened to be applicable to real-world management decisions.

There are several types of Real Options. Let’s see if the option metaphor is a useful one. How can we apply Real Options in the real world?

The option to delay a project

In this paper, Aswath Damodaran compares a Net Present Value (NPV) analysis with a Real Options analysis to decide which projects to fund when. Projects with a negative NPV now, might still become valuable later. That’s because the Real Options analysis takes into account the value of getting more information and therefore reducing risk and uncertainty.

We always have the Learning Option. We can always gather more information.

In the article, the delay is examined in a situation where the organisation has (or can buy) a way to get a hold on the market, like with a patent. We can create an option to delay a project even in a competitive market: if we have a shorter cycle time than our competitors we can afford to wait longer to start our projects. This gives us more time to gather market information. In a very volatile market, it can be more valuable to wait, to increase the odds of building the right product at the right time.

For example, if Toyota’s new product development time is 6 months shorter than a competitor, Toyota can afford to start development 6 months later. That’s 6 months in which to gather more information, six months in which they could see major swings in customer demand or in the market. That’s six months in which people can work on other projects.

So, if you decrease your cycle time you create options to

Increase your cash flow
Be first on the market
Delay the project, take the go/no go decision later, when we have more information

By using Lean and Agile methods to decrease cycle time, we create real options. Starting later may be the right thing to do.

There are more fun real options, like the option to abandon a project. What could be the value of abandoning a project?

Dec

Spaceships over London – Real Options at XP Days

Real Options Space Game

Do you want to prevent galactic war? Do you have experience flying spaceships in dangerous corners of the universe? Not afraid of space pirates and angry aliens? Then sign up for the Real Options Space Game at XP Days London. The pay isn’t great, but the benefits more than make up for that.

The Real Options Space Game is a board game for 6-13 players that lets you play with Real Options concepts. Portia and I will be running two games in parallel (in parallel universes?), so that we can compare many different strategies, a sort of set-based design.

In the game, pairs play the crew of a spaceship who must transport a precious cargo from one end of the galaxy to another. On the way, the crew has to deal with risks such as attacks by space pirates, strikes by disgruntled transport workers, disputes between different alien races, technology breakdowns and more bizarre plot twists. And they have to do it with limited resources and time. Sound familiar?

What are Real Options?

Real Options is a decision-making tool that, like so many of these tools, looks deceptively simple. It’s just common sense, most people respond when we first explain the concepts. But we quickly see that these simple concepts aren’t applied. We can explain Real Options until we’re blue in the face without any effect. You have to experience how to apply the tool under (simulated) pressure to realize if and how Real Options are useful.

Real Options consists of two components:

The concept of options. Each option has
- A value
- A buying and exercising cost
- An expiry condition which determines when the option becomes useless

A process to deal with options:
- A way to determine the last moment when we have to take a decision and commit ourselves
- Keeping as many options open as long as possible
- Actively seeking out more information and more options in the time before we have to commit

Unlike with financial options, we often don’t have exact numbers for cost and value. Most of the time we don’t need the numbers, we only need to know which of two options has a higher value or lower cost.

And what does that have to do with XP and Agile?

You can apply Real Options in just about any situation where you’re faced with difficult decisions. Once you know the concepts, you see options everywhere.

Real Options underlie some of the tricky Agile and Lean practices. By working with short releases and user stories that are elaborated during a release, we push back the moment of difficult decisions, so that we have more time to gather information. By using good engineering practices (TDD, refactoring, continuous integration…) we lower the cost of changes and decisions, again pushing back the moment of decision. Meanwhile, we have more options open for the direction of the application. Set-based design is an economical way of exploring may design options

It all sounds very reasonable to me, but much of the resistance against Agile is about the ideal moment of decision. Most of us feel more comfortable when we’ve made a decision. Having lots of open options may seem like procrastination or even indecisiveness. We feel the need to make that decision NOW, especially when we’re under pressure. Keeping our heads cool and applying the Real Options tool can help us make better informed decisions.

Once we practice Real Options in real life, we start asking “when do we have to decide?” and we look for more options. Try it, practice it, so that you can take better decisions under pressure.

See you at XP Days London, 11-12 December 2008.

Pictures by Pentadact (spaceship), Jason Pratt (sunrise) and Nasa/JPL (planet). Used with permission

Nov

SimBlogging: XP Days Benelux 2008 Retrospective

‘SimBlogging‘ offers a his and hers viewpoint as Pascal and Portia timebox-blog simultaneously

From dawn …

At the crack of dawn, organisers and friends hold a standup to kick off the day. Most of the material had already been brought in and prepared the night before, after the pre-conference dinner and drinks. Tasks are quickly written on sticky notes; the wall serves as our kanban board. All the tasks quickly move to Done as everyone chips in. Participants trickle in, grab some coffee to wake up and register. XP Days is rolling.

The day traditionally starts with the Official One Minute Presentations (OOMPs), shortened to 30 seconds because of the large number of sessions, where presenters pitch their session in weird, funny and unusual ways. This immediately sets the right tone for the conference: Agile is serious, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

… till dusk

Every day closes with the mirror of the OOMPs, the Official One Minute Participant Presentations. For each session in turn, session participants stand up and tell us what the session was about and what they learned, so that everybody at least gets some information about the sessions they missed. Judging by the smiling faces everybody had a great day taking part in interesting sessions.

At XP Days Benelux we don’t differentiate between speakers and participants, other than that speakers get in for free. XP Days Benelux is about sharing, communication and collaboration.

Gaming into the night

Each participant could choose a persona for their badge. Nicole and Johan had devised a social game with the session proposal personas: participants should seek out people with interesting personas to create a team. Teams had to present themselves at the closing and won prizes. The persona game was a great way to meet with new people and created a lot of buzz during the whole conference.

The fun and discussions continued well into the night at the bar (with free drinks thanks to our sponsors) and at dinner. Conversations continued well into the night at the bar. The more energetic and competitive participants played board games until 2:30 at the Games Night.

House rules

At the start of the conference we explain that XP Days Benelux has only one rule:

Participants participate

Most of the sessions are interactive, participative and invite discussion. For the organisers, there’s very little work to do after the sessions start. We try to manage with a light touch. We offer the participants the context in which they can create their conference. Two examples of participants taking responsibility were:

Jamie and Joke stepping in to organise an Open Space session and an impromptu presentation about Agile Analysis to replace two cancelled sessions.
A group of participants helping the friendly ladies from Koningshof plan the asymmetric coffee breaks on Friday afternoon.

Sessions

The Critical Chain session by Christophe and Olivier let us build cars with Lego to improve our planning prowess. Not surprisingly, the two teams that collaborated and shared knowledge did better than the other teams.

Seeking to Perceive more than to be Perceived by Emmanuel and Bernard let us experiment with three communication tools, “Investigate Protocol”, “Soft Focus” and “Emic Interviewing”. The aim of the session was to come up with ideas and a plan to improve next year’s conference. There were some good ideas in the session. If you want to help make them reality, contact us and volunteer for XP Days Benelux 2009.

Vera, Portia and I ran the Business Value Game with five teams. The participants were really absorbed by the game. The standup retrospectives allowed the players to reflect on the questions raised by the game. One of the takeaway points from the session was that we need to have a (probably difficult) conversation about the way our company, our team prioritises because that will reveal what we really value.

A whole room of Agilistas was rapt listening to Portia retell the Snow White fairy tale in the “Mirror Mirror… Why Me?” session. The participants speed-networked and reflected before working together to come up with a dwarve dream team to realise their fantasy project. The session ended on a high note with the “one minute investor pitches” where the projects and the teams were presented.

Including “Working with Resistance” in the program was a bit of a gamble. Would participants be interested in an Aikido session? We’re happy that Olivier Costa proposed this session, because a packed room participated in the exercises and stood in awe at the demonstrations by Olivier and his sensei Frank. After a whole day of working with our heads and hearts, this session got our body working. The lessons for introducing change are clear: work with the other’s energy, not against it.

Done

Another XP Days Benelux is over.

We’re collecting the feedback and ideas of participants and organizers to improve next year’s edition. If you want to make XP Days Benelux 2009 better, contact us to become part of the organising team.

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Photos by Xavier Quesada and Portia Tung

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