me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Raphaël Pierquin just put the rough version of the agile open france proceedings online – to enable ‘us bloggers’ to start using the proceedings he uploaded scanned images with an index. A more polished version will follow later. This ‘reduce cycle time’ version already provides lots of value to me. For instance, I can now show you the beautiful notes Antoine Contal made of ‘Beyond Agile’:

Notes of Beyond Agile. Click the image for the full-size scan.

I decided to propose a run of “beyond agile”, so I could try a different way of presenting the cultural patterns before qcon London this wednesday. The runs at xp days last year (then dubbed ‘people vs process’) were well received, and gave us ideas for improvement:

• we needed the question and answer time to get across why we believe these patterns are useful in our work (they help us determine where we are, and decide on a strategy on where / how to go next),
• attendees got the idea that one goes from one pattern to the next in a linear fashion. We then presented it in a linear fashion then, so surprise,surprise…

In this instance, I ditched the slides and presented from flipchart. After presenting the ‘why’, the participants did a round of experiences on the questions:

• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too much process? ‘
• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too little process? ‘

We then gradually constructed the circle, starting with the cultural pattern (‘routine’) suggested in the story told by the last participant. Meanwhile, I explained some common choreographies (the arrows), each with their advantages and difficulties through stories:

We discussed more choreographies than could sensibly make the notes, and further discussions over dinner gave me some more inspiration. Even this ‘circular’ drawing follows the same linearity as in Gerald Weinbergs’ books. In wednesdays’ presentation we’re also going to talk about some other choreographies (e.g. going from routine, or routine to oblivious).

As you might guess from the notes, we ran the entire session in french. I needed to ask for some words, and probably my grammar is not up to par, but overall it went much smoother than I expected. The other participants were extremely helpful in letting me and Barry Evans speak as much french as we could, providing us with words when needed, and allowing us to switch back to english when we couldn’t manage in french – less and less frequently needed as the days passed .

So now it’s time to re-order the slides in a quasi-random order – some order that allows us to string stories together in a way that makes sense to the audience, add choreography slides and practice a bit more. I hope to see you at qcon on wednesday.

I went to Agile Open NorthWest last year, and it was a blast! This year’s announcement is eh, just-in-time, so I won’t be able to make it, but I strongly recommend it. Here is there announcement:

Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents Agile Open Northwest 2008.

Our first agile open event, Agile Open Northwest 2007, was held last year and was a great success. This year, we once again invite 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest and beyond to join us in tackling the issues around the theme of agile development in the real world.

The Northwest has a wealth of practitioners with years of real-world experience with agile methods and self-organizing teams. Agile Open Northwest offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for agile development. Your commitment to arriving at the beginning and staying until the end both days will ensure we build on conversation after conversation as we engage important questions like:

• Who practices Agile in the Northwest and what is its impact?
• What is “Agile” anyway? What does it look like in organizations?
• What are the technical challenges facing Agile?
• How does Agile co-exist with project management, process control and other governance structures?
• Can we adapt agile practices to our organizations without diluting them?
• Can agile methods work in big, risky projects?
• Can distributed teams use agile approaches?

This event is designed to allow agile practitioners to meet in self-organizing groups where they can share their latest ideas, challenges, hopes, experiences and experiments. We follow an Open Space format to foster collaboration and allow the conference to take its direction from the participants themselves.

• What: An Open Space event discussing agile practices and techniques.
• Where: Seattle Center, in several of the Northwest Rooms.
• When: March 18 and 19, 2008
• Who: Anyone with some degree of experience in agile methods
• Cost: $100 per person, including lunch both days

I was just chatting with Bernard Notarianni. The first Agile Open France is about to happen … Probably on March 7 and 8 (update: it is now March 5,6 and 7), somewhere near Paris – Bernard, Emmanuel and Raphael are finalizing the location details and hope to start marketing next week.

They plan to have the conference site in the general Agile Open website, so I made it bi-lingual, technically at least, translations are probably best left to the french

“France Villandry” by Francisco Antunes

Tomorrow and the day after sees Agile Open California come to life. With a strong theme “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream” , and a good number and variety of participants, it looks like an interesting addition to earlier Agile Opens in Europe and Agile Open Northwest.

The Agile Open 2007 Europe Book of Proceedings is out now!

Monday planning session

It contains photos as well as results of individual sessions. We asked the session conveners to provide (handwritten) notes of each session. Raphael Pierquin scanned the session notes, and combined them with photos of flipcharts and people in the session to PDF documents.

Diana, Stephan, Bernard Zero and Rachel have Fun with Agile 

We ran this as an expiriment to see if we could have an in-between form from open space by-the-book (handwritten proceedings copied to paper – is timely, but costs lots of paper and is not searchable ) and a wiki (does not need paper, is searchable, but participants often leave writing down the results for ‘later’ ).

The book of proceedings is not yet complete, published in the ‘release early, release often’ spirit. The PDF’s are attached to an an individual results page for the session – we hope participants will transcribe some of the  results, so we have both timely as well as searchable results.

 Jan, Nynke, Robert and Erik enjoy the scenery

I hope to write something substantial again, soonish . Meanwhile some announcements you might be interested in.

On June 15 Marc Evers and yours truly are hosting  Agile Open @ the International Association of Facilitators Benelux conference (In De Bovendonk, Hoeven, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands) . This year we are taking our eXPerience with open spaces on the road, and do open space related workshops inside other conferences. The one @ the IAF conference is more meta – a small experience of Open Space followed by reflective practitioners And then some more practice in the Open Space that afternoon, facilitated by Nynke Fokma an participants in the morning workshop.

I have heard registration for the IAF conference is going well (around a hundred registrants), and there are still some places available. The event is partially in Dutch, but I’m sure the Open Space will adapt to the right people .  And the Appreciative Inquiry workshop by Andrew Ballance (parrallel with Agile Open @ IAF) will be in English for sure.  Hope to see you there!

Agile Open Europe, the Summer 2007 edition is coming up soon (June 11 and 12, Hilversum, the Netherlands). So far we have eleven registrants from five different countries: France, Poland, United States, Great Britain and, last but not least, The Netherlands – host country . That means that we have about nineteen places left. They are going moderately fast. If you are thinking about joining us, please register soon-ish, so we can keep all the rooms we booked.

More about the location

Diana Larsen asked us whether the location was easy to reach from Schiphol/Amsterdam Airport.

We chose Hilversum specifically, because it is not far from Schiphol Airport (www.schiphol.nl) (the main airport, near Amsterdam), hoping to attract people from the US who would be ‘around’ in that time of year anyway…

There is a direct train connection from Schiphol to Hilversum (takes bout 40 minutes, connection about every 15 minutes), and then it is about 10 minutes by Taxi to the conference location. ( train connections are at http://www.ns.nl/ – the ‘english’ switch is on top right of the page). Train stations are called ‘schiphol’ and ‘hilversum’.

I mentioned a Taxi ride, since the location is surrounded by heath with patches of forest, and walking from the bus stop down the entry lane would take you about ten, fifteen minutes maybe…

If we fill up, it will be a very nice location indeed – the conference location is on fairly large grounds, with only a few buildings on it, one will be dedicated to Agile Open. We hope to see you there

Agile Open NorthWest gave me a lot of energy. The participants were amazing, newbies and old hands alike – because everyone was actually doing stuff with it in the real world, following the theme “Agile for Real”. I got some answers on questions I had and I came out with stuff to continue working on.

This blog entry is a bit late, which is in no small part due to the fact that I’m still buzzed by this event…

I did not take many photos during the event, as I was too busy participating. I enjoyed most of the sessions I went to, and at several timeslots wished I could be in multiple places at the same time, so I could go to other sessions.

Sessions I enjoyed & gave me almost instant business value:

FunctionalTestingTools, Agile Testing with Testers, TDD for Managers (I still have to post the notes for that one… a session on how to let non-technical people experience Test Driven Development), Green Eggs and Ham, Tools/Techniques for Distributed Communication, Filling out SCRUM with XP, CoEvolutionPicnic. Two sessions I wished I could have also gone: AppreciatoriumProject, and FutureOfUnitTesting .

The action planning at the end of the event turned out to be pretty succesful. Future of Unit testing is getting its’ own workshop (hosted by Kent Beck), some people started preparing a product owners’ workshop, to collect experiences from product owners and… yet another Agile Open got initiated – a group from the San Francisco Bay Area got together to plan one .

This goes to show that open space can be very goal- and action-oriented, and that whatever happens in the sessions is actionable – because people do what matters most to them, just in time.

Some of the few photos.

Elizabeth Hendrickson hosting a session on educational games

Charlie Poole welcomes the participants

Some of my friends wonder where I am from time to time Haven’t been blogging for a while now – ruminating on stuff, writing on a book project with a couple of people, going out on coaching assignments, and this week teaching the tenth eXperience Agile course here in Eindhoven. Oh, and while I was procrastinating on my bookkeeping I redesigned livingsoftware.nl (again ), now running on drupal, and some minor edits to the text. Because of the book project, I’m having fun in writing again.

It might be a while until you hear from me again, pollen of Agile Open have blown to Portland Oregon, and I’m going there to attend Agile Open Northwest and an Agile Alliance Board meeting. And… a few days off. I travelled to some nice places last year, and did not take the time to see the surrounding. And then, on the way back, thinking, why did I not spend a couple of days extra here…
The Agile Open Northwest Logo is interesting, they crossbred Marc’s logo with a tree You’ve got to love branches.

I’m having an open space themed week:

• I’m going to CITCON in London – the unconference on continous integration and testing, friday evening and saturday.
• Preparations for the International Open Space Technology Training in Berlin (November 2 through to 9) have started. Another participant has created a mailing list, to virtually open the space, and the organisers inform us there are still a few places available (currently 41 participants, 15 places left). I’m looking forward to this. Since leaving university I haven’t been on a course this long… (it’s a full week, including a weekend).
• Two sessions in the XP Days Benelux program have joined forces to form an open space track divided over two afternoons. Thursday afternoon features a themed open space track on How can your business benefit from agile facilitated by Anko Tijman and friday afternoon wil be ‘open’ open space (the session previously known as the planned unprepared session) intended to let the participants reflect on sessions they’ve attended so far and discuss important last-minute topics. We’ve got an energetic bunch of people together preparing these – if the sessions are going to be as much fun as the preparation… A manager says:
  

  I spend a lot of my time dealing with and talking to managers about agility and how the principles of XP are relevant to the non programmers in the organisation. It may seem obvious to us but sometimes it needs to be spelled out. There is a sort of fear of loss of control from most of the management people I talk to. I have to assure them that control is an illusion at the best of times and that trust is a better, more productive way. One of the things I like about the open open session is that it grasps that fear and says “ok lets see what happens if you do relinquish control – will people mutiny and waste time or will they rally and try to address the issues.”. We can use these sessions to show that people will naturally allow the real priorities to surface and in a more direct way than they might otherwise be able to on a rigid agenda.

• Diana Larsen said at Agile2006 there might be an american open space conference on agile. Her company’s event calendar says its on January 30 – 31, 2007 and it goes by the name Agile Open NW in Portland, OR USA. More Agile Opens . The website isn’t up yet apparently, hope it will be soon.