Sandra, one of the product owners, explains her point of view, Serge listens intently as facilitator

Now, lets' hear the second group of product owners, with their position

Nicole and I thought it would be fun do design a simulation game around facilitating retrospectives. At first we came up with a sort of board game, but after some brainstorming we thought a role-play would work better – our board game was turning out to be a bit too simplistic for our taste.

These are the benefits we proposed for our session at XP Days Benelux 2009, November 23/24:

• Learn new techniques by applying them to a simulated real world situation
• Experiment with techniques you already know – do something different with them
• Hold an emergency retrospective to ‘get to the bottom of it’ and come up with sustainable solutions quickly.
• Get some fresh ideas to do group reflection on emergency situations and longer timespans

At XP Days we have an hour and 45 minutes, for the try out at Agile Open we decided to see what we could do in a 60 minute timeslot to get as much feedback as possible on our game ideas. For the XP days version we were thinking about playing two simulation rounds, in which the participants get to deal with a) facilitating during an emergency situation and b) facilitating a retrospective over a longer period (weeks or months).

We were most curious about facilitating in an emergency; what we expect to learn from these simulations as hosts is observing facilitators ‘in the wild’ under controlled conditions and seeing how they behave, and what techniques work in which circumstances (we have our preferences, but they do not necessarily end up in the simulation). For the longer-term retrospective part we still would like to do a trial run. contact me if you’re interested in hosting it.

Therefore we designed a role play that happens in a Bank, something went terribly wrong and after the facilitator comes in on a monday morning he or she is asked to facilitate a ‘hero retrospective’ : find out what went wrong quickly and get the group to agree on some actions.One or two participants play facilitator, while the other participants play roles like product owners, helpdesk boss, development team and systems administrators. We give everybody an overview of the situation, and then each role receives an envelope with a more detailed description of what happened from their point of view. This leads to a group situation where everybody has partial information, so one of the challenges for the facilitator is to surface all the relevant information quickly. (I won’t say much more, because I fear that would spoil the simulation in case you come and play it…)

We creatively brainstormed the situation and roles based on our own experiences. And it worked. One of the players asked me ‘does this happen?’ about something that I experienced during a meeting; some of the assignments and poses of the roles seem far-fetched, but things get political when people have to divide resources, and as a facilitator you’d best be prepared to not be surprised about that

You might say ‘that is not a retrospective’, and you may be right; that is something that we want the participants to figure out and discuss in the debrief. And at Agile Open they did. Participants found that for effective facilitation you need to find a technique and style that fits you, the participants and the context. Some ‘participants’ preferred a ‘businesslike’ style, focused on only content, while others seemed to prefer also getting the mood of the people on the table.

In writing this sounds like knocking down an open door, but the emergency role play was pretty intense, with at least one facilitator behaving differently from his own expectations. We really did manage to create a stress situation .

Now we have to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next with the simulations and the workshop. The participants gave us a good amount of useful feedback. The roleplay worked well, so we are going to keep that, but how to fit it into an overal workshop seems to, ehh, depend . We introduced two techniques before the simulation, and encouraged the facilitators to use one of those two. Next time we may only chose one, and see how that compares between groups, or alternatively (especially in an in-house course where we have more time), start out without a specific suggestion, roleplay and learn from the debrief, maybe explain a technique and try again, and see what difference that makes.

In reviewing the session for XP Days, Pierluigi Pugliese suggested we add observers to the list of roles, and give them specific instructions. That seemed to work well.

Jorrit shares his observations with the group

Since we are operating a kind of pull system for workshops, we asked ourselves beforhand: what do we want to learn from the try-out (does the simulation work? This is the first roleplay I helped create.), and what is the least amount of work we need to do to get that feedback. Therefore we created all the role descriptions in dutch…

Deborah Preuss wanted to participate, and while she speaks and understands a couple of languages, dutch is not among them. So we improvised and gave her, as an observer, the task to observe and interpret body language. Because of this the players learned about the effect of finger pointing, and that they were doing it without realizing it… The debrief was interesting. Deb noted that at some point several players’ body language indicated they knew enough and were finished with the discussion.

Deborah observes body language of one group

From the players’ perspective that was partially true: some of the players were finished with the discussion, not because they were satisfied, but because they realized they had nothing to gain by the meeting, as their concerns went unheard (and unacted upon).

For those of you who asked me what Retrospective Hero was, and what it was about, I hope this cleared it up a bit. I welcome your questions and suggestions. For those of you who participated or observed, we’d love to know what you feel about the game after a few weeks.

In any case, we hope you join us at XP Days Benelux 2009 to experience the extended version

Xavier Quesada Allue tells me this will be mostly in Spanish. My Spanish stops around ‘donda esta el bano’ and ‘hola’, unfortunately. If yours goes further, this might be for you. Madrid as a location is attractive, and should be easy to reach. No doubt the organisation will be very good as well, and the event is for free!

electronic waterfall by curly_exp( l)osure

In the meantime, if you speak english, why not attend Agile Open Holland – my named cloud is bigger than yours, or is it?, September 10 & 11? Registrations are going fast. At last count we had over 50 participants, with space for about 80. As in previous years it’s looking to attract a good mix of old & new faces, all equally fanatical about uncovering better ways to develop software. It’s not free, but we kept registrations low enough – we hope the value for money makes it a no-brainer; the fee covers part of the costs, but its’ main purpose is to prevent no-shows, so that everybody who wants to attend, can attend. I hope to see you there!

Madrid scenes de rue by George Eastman House

We chose the theme ‘my method is bigger than yours… or is it?’ because it seems that as this agile software development thing goes mainstream more and more people lose sight of what we perceived was one of the underlying goals of the Agile Manifesto: get continuous experimentation and learning going by developing software and helping others do it across communities – hence the signing by people involved in all ‘lightweight’ methodologies at the time. We like the Named clouds meme and hope it spurs some discussions.

Even if this theme does not speak to you, come to Agile Open Holland anyway – anything goes, and new cloud formations are likely to form during the conference. Named ones in the sessions and the hallways, unnamed ones in the sky (we do hope the sun shines most of the time though..).

Hotel Arnold at dawn

To me neither. This was my place of work for three days during Agile Open France.  The effect it has on me is hard to explain, I hope the pictures help paint a clearer eh, picture.

I went out after breakfast on the second day, the Alsatian hills were covered with frozen dew. This may not look spectacular to you, but I live in flatland, where the snow had just vanished.

Dawn

Grapes grow next to the hotel,

Frozen vines

and the wine that results from it was served across the street.

La Vinstub - big lunches and dinner with wine from down the street

At this conference nobody seemed to be local, so everybody made an effort to get to this lovely middle of nowhere. For me, it was worth driving over six hours, especially during the day it is a lovely drive in the Ardennes over  Belgium, Germany and France. This year I had the good fortune to travel with a passenger – Nynke Fokma was my navigator. We had not seen each other for a while, so the conference already started in the car

The car conversation was a bit too good, so I drove past the exit we needed on the French highway. The detour we took after that was extremely scenic, which compensated for the fact that we missed half of the opening. We were in time to put some sessions on the agenda,

Emmanuel Gaillot opens day II

and I was present at the opening on the Thursday, assisted by a breakfast with unlimited coffee….

The Belgians (Peter Janssens, Patrick Debois en Koen van Exem) at breakfast

which was necessary, because the nights in the Retro Lounge are long, and dinner is ‘heavy’ with a free flow of tasty local wine…. I brought a poker case

The poker game

and the game ‘Machiavelli’ with me, for which we translated the game rules while playing from Dutch to French, that was a challenge,

but it worked, so we played it both nights. On thursday night we had too many players, so we paired up. Pair-playing with Emmanuel was fun.

What can I say?

The Retro Lounge is also my favourite spot for daytime sessions, comfy chairs and couches, poker tables for if you want to put up a computer, and when you stand up a view on the hills.

Koen van Exem explains dimensional pull

This makes for a relaxed setting, in which new and old ideas can be put through the grinder, and experiential sessions blossom. Although projectors seemed forbidden (there was no available) other rooms were suitable for coders’ dojos.

'Adventures in lisp' coders dojo

We used two computers, the network and vnc to learn about lisp in a coding dojo.

Timeline

The timeline held more than enough topics of interest, even with ‘just four tracks’, there was plenty to choose from in each slot. And there is always the option to butterfly, naturally. For instance by going out in the freezing cold to have a smoke,

Church square at night - Itterswiller

or take a walk in the dead calm of the village.

Emmanuel Gaillot and Raphael Pierquin

The organizers Emmanuel Gaillot, Raphael Pierquin, Luc Bizeul and Bernard Notarianni did a great job, with administrative support from Laurent Bossavit at XP-France (now Agile France). Organizing a conference without a program like this can look deceptively simple. I stayed after the closing to witness Nynke facilitate the retrospective.  I expected it to be quick, but I was wrong… Working with a part-time distributed team is often difficult and can easily lead to misunderstandings, though everyone does the best they can. Maybe in a follow up post I’ll have permission to show you the picture of the timeline to explain what happened.

In the end, the conference was a great success for me personally, and for the other participants as well, as far as I could tell. I had a lot of fun, learned a lot and went home buzzing with new ideas, energized to realize at least some of them during the year.

Now I am looking forward to attending Agile Open Belgium, two weeks from now. There might be a few places left, I hope it is going to be as inspiring as Agile Open France. By that time I have carried out some of the ideas from France, so that I have space for some new ones. Instead of a village with local French wine, we will have a city (Gent) with local Belgian beer

If you live in the US, I highly recommend Agile Open Northwest, in Portland next week, one of the best US conferences I have attended. Meanwhile, in South America Agile Open Buenos Aires has opened registration for the first time. Having met some of the organisers, and heard about their location and plan it will be spectacular in March. I will not be able to attend either of them, but if I was nearby, I would not hesitate to register.

Enjoy!

This panorama photo of the introduction was made by Harald Walker, who volunteered to be our resident photographer. He’s already posted his impressions . On thursday it was a bit rainy, so all sessions were inside. Friday was a nice, sunny day, so there were a good number of sessions outside – I spent all day in the garden. The Volksuniversiteit Utrecht has a nice location in the middle of the old centre, with a garden in the back – we always look for a location with nice, green outdoor space and that is easily reached by public transport. Usually these two conflict, not in this case.

We succeeded in simplifying the organisation, and in enrolling some volunteers, so that Marc and I could also participate in sessions I enjoyed (re)newing connections and learning a thing or two from the sessions – maybe more on that later.

So last week, we finally got together around a whiteboard, decided that we did want to hold it in June (like last year, and as we planned), but we didn’t have a location etc. and didn’t want to spend as much time as last year in sending out invoices, dealing with exceptions etc.

So, we decided to go with an affordable conference location and leave things like hotel, dinner out of the basic package. That means we can send out just one type of invoice – you come two days, or you don’t, and  beside diet preferences there are no options. Well, you can of course volunteer (we got spontaneous offers for that. ) or sponsor.  We also decided to cap the conference at just thirty participants, so we could go with the venue. One of the reasons being, we thought we can’t get that many participants in a month anyway… Surprise, surprise, sending out the invite to a couple of mailinglists, and we’ve already passed the twenty participants mark. And we have some sponsors as well (we didn’t expect many in this timeframe, so we’re pleasantly surprised. Now we have to make sponsor packages and facilitate the other volunteers so we can self-organize )

So, without much further ado, I’m proud to announce the next

Agile Open Europe 2008

will take place in Utrecht, NL on June 5th and 6th. A vibrant place to push the envelope and do business together. And yes, we will find Belgian Beer – one participant listed that as a dietary requirement   Looks like its’ going to be good fun again. See you there!

And if you ’still’ haven’t registered – there’s a handful of places left…