NAYIMA
May
14

Mini XP Day Benelux 2009: A Retrospective

What Went Well

  • Beating the traffic jams to arrive first at the conference center.
  • The helpful staff at Elewijt Center going beyond the call of duty. E.g. the night watchman doubled as barman to offer us coffee and hot chocolate before the bar staff arrived.
  • The organisers quickly self-organised and divided the work before and at the conference.
  • Preparing the Business Value Game just-in-time.
  • Organising the new version of the Business Value Game with Portia and Vera. We’ll publish this new version soon and explain the ideas in the closing retrospective more.
  • Talking with participants between sessions and after the conference.
  • Plenty of useful feedback about the conference and the sessions.
  • The retrospective dinner in Mechelen with the organisers.
  • The conference goodies organised by Vera and the traditional Belgian presenter gifts of Carolus beer and chocolate.

What Went Wrong

  • We started the conference late because many participants were stuck in traffic. Throughout the day, sessions started late and/or overran so that there was less time for breaks, lunch and some sessions.
  • Not enough time to talk to everybody during and (especially) after the conference.

Puzzles

  • Why so few participants from The Netherlands?
  • Many sessions got “Needs more time” as feedback. As these sessions were re-run, we’d expect that presenters would know how much material would fit. Or is this a case of “second-system syndrome“?

Lessons Re-Learnt

  • Agile, communication, collaboration, feedback and trust work when you need to organise something like a conference.
  • Interest in Agile methods remains high.
  • Participants report that Agile methods have improved how they work. At the least, they make issues a lot more visible. The difficult bit is tackling those issues, especially when they touch upon “sacred cows” like how the company is organised, how people  are rewarded, how to collaborate over departments, local goals…
May 14th, 2009 | Category: agile, presentations, XP Days Benelux, xpday
Apr
11

SPA 2009: a retrospective

Back from SPA 2009.

What I liked

  • Running the conference as a non-residential conference in the heart of London. Staying in a hotel literally around the corner. Morning running along the Thames.
  • Interactive sessions like “Pitching Agile” and “Pairing: Beyond Programming” which challenge us to put our ideas to the test. Both sessions gave good opportunities to work in teams and reflect on what we value. And, of course, lots of Post-its were used to brainstorm, plan and explain 🙂
  • Meeting old and new acquaintances inside and outside of the conference.
  • Running the Business Value Game including a workshop with Vera and Portia. The game was designed to help our customers think about how they prioritise the project. The game doesn’t give answers, it raises questions. More about the workshop and its results later.
  • Preparing and running a tryout of “The First Five Steps to Become Really agile“. A big thank you for the 7 intrepid players who gave us plenty of feedback to improve the session.
  • The conference closing with concrete actions to follow up on the conference. I’ll have to write about cost and value estimation and about incremental funding and real options.

To make it perfect, I would

  • Like to have a bit more room in the sessions and during lunches and breaks. The size of the venue was ok for the number of participants, but only just.
  • Put some shorter sessions into the program. Two sessions a day (+ a keynote or BoF) doesn’t give much variety.
  • Let presenters and organisers work together to improve their proposals collaboratively, like we do it for XP Days Benelux. The quality of the sessions and proposals improve a lot, even those from experienced presenters.
  • Give session (and BoF?) presenters some time to pitch their session to help us to select the session with the most (business) value.
  • Improve the Business Value Game presentation, so that the game is clearer from the start.
  • Ask more concrete questions, set more detailed goals for the follow up workshop.

Vera, Portia, Laurent and I will improve the Business Value Game with the feedback from the participants. Next games: Mini XP Day Benelux (in English) XP Days France (in French).

April 11th, 2009 | Category: agile, games, XP Days Benelux, xpday
Nov
24

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.

—

Photos by Xavier Quesada and Portia Tung

November 24th, 2008 | Category: agile, XP Days Benelux, xpday
Nov
19

XP Day Benelux – 2

Preparing for XP Days Benelux

Thursday, the XP Days Benelux start. The first sessions start at 10:00; the conference organisation is about done by then. Once the conference gets going, there’s not a lot of work for the organisers. From then on, the session presenters and participants have to do their bit. We’re not kidding when we say that “the focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone”.

Bigger and better than ever before

At least it’s bigger than before. The number of participants has grown steadily from 85 in the first year to more than 150 this year. We’ve always set a cap on the number of participants: 30 participants per track. That (plus or minus 10) is about the number of participants with whom you can have really interactive session.

Better?

We’ll know from the retrospective if we’ve improved on last year.

See you there

Or if you can’t be there, follow the conference via the FriendFeed XP Days Benelux room or read our presenter and attendees’ blogs.

More later.

November 19th, 2008 | Category: agile, XP Days Benelux, xpday
Oct
26

Agile Holland Conference 2008

Off to Amsterdam

Vera and I travelled to Amsterdam to play the Business Value Game at the first Agile Holland Conference in Amsterdam. The one day conference was set in the “Montessori College Oost“, a school with a very distinctive architecture.

In the train to Amsterdam we started the development of a new training workshop on discovering, hunting and fishing for User Stories. The Stories are out there, but they’re not easy to catch. Fortunately, there are some simple techniques we can use to get on the right track. Unfortunately, explaining simple ideas is very hard.

Money, money, money

When we arrived, Martien van Steenbergen was already explaining participants how to play the “Serious Crazy Money Game“. Players had to buy and sell products from each other during the day as way to get to meet new people and learn something about value, trust and cooperation. The XP Game and the Business Value Game were among the products. We had come to give away the Business Value Game.

Business Value Game

Three teams of 6-7 people competed to play the new Business Value Game v1.1. You can see from the pictures that they have this combination of total concentration and immersion with fun that characterizes learning moments.

Becoming a team

The first two rounds took a long time: we need to explain the rules and techniques and the group of strangers needs to become a team. After two iterations we held a standup retrospective to share what each team had learned, which strategies they were using and to resolve issues. After the retro, there was a coffee break.

Back from the coffee break, the teams started to work faster. Whereas the first two iterations and the retrospective take 45 minutes, the next two iterations have to be completed in 15 minutes total. Despite the time pressure and the will to win, the players stuck to the Agile values of Communication and Collaboration. Even when we tried to divise the team by giving chocolate bonuses to the “account managers” who managed to get “their customer’s” projects released, the players kept looking at the whole. They prioritised in the interests of the whole team. Some account managers even chose chocolate bonuses that they could share with the rest of the team.

Most of the teams didn’t notice the “small print”: some of the customer requests have extra conditions or information that have a large impact on the team’s decisions. We had to remind the players to look at customer’s request carefully and to ask us for more information.

Lessons learned

And what have we learned today? Amongst others:

  • Carefully read and ask what the customer really means and really wants. “Don’t guess! Ask.”
  • The economic benefit of releasing sooner.
  • Business Value is primarily useful on Epic level, less on User Story level. In some cases, looking at the business value of individual stories helps us to prioritize stories.
  • The difference between iterations and releases. The difference between iteration planning and release planning.
  • The difference between potential value, features developed but not released, and actual value, features released, deployed and paid for.

For me, the lesson of the Business Value Game can be summarized as follows:

Business Value is not a value.

Business Value is a function.

Business Value is a function of what you value.

Too often, prioritisation or selection of projects is done by “gut feeling”. When we introduce Business Value, we start a conversation about values. Which factors will we take into account when we prioritise?

  • How much money we can make in the short term?
  • How much money we expect to make in the long term?
  • How (un)happy a customer is?
  • How hard the customer shouts?
  • How much we like the customer?
  • How well the customer knows our CEO?
  • The size of the bonus for the salesperson who sold the project?
  • How late the project is?
  • Constraints?
  • Deadlines?
  • How (un)happy our team is?
  • The capacity of our team?
  • Strategic objectives?
  • ….

That’s the conversation the teams have during the first iterations. Once they know the factors they value and the weight of the factors, they can prioritise effectively.

How do you prioritise your projects? What does that say about your values?

Do you want to learn about “Business Value”, prioritising your backlog, portfolio management and all the challenges that salespeople and account managers face daily? Do you want to experience the benefits of working with short iterations and releasing early? Do you want have fun while you learn? Download the Business Value Game, print the cards and organise your own game.

Creative Commons License The Business Value Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Or come and play the Business Value Game at:

October 26th, 2008 | Category: agile, presentations, XP Days Benelux
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