Systems thinking about software development
Retrospective Hero is a new simulation / role playing workshop I’m developing with Nicole Belilos of Task24. The goal is to let facilitators experience several situations that can happen in real life, and let them experiment with facilitation techniques to make the most of a situation. This is a report of the trial run we held at Agile Open Holland 2009, with an explanation on how the workshop works.
Sandra, one of the product owners, explains her point of view, Serge listens intently as facilitator
The Trousers of Reality Book Cover
Barry Evans works as an independent consultant and writer, and is based in France and the UK. I met Barry a few years ago at Agile Open in Belgium, when he was working as a senior coach in BT’s large-scale Agile introduction. Now we’ve done an interview to find out more about his new book “The Trousers of Reality”.
Willem: So Barry, When did you start thinking about writing a book?
Barry: I have always been a writer. I come from a literary family and it was always something I wanted to do..
Willem: what triggered you to write this one?
Barry: I started writing this book when I realised I had something to say and I had enough life experience behind me.
Continue reading ‘An Interview with Barry Evans, author of “The Trousers Of Reality, volume 1″’
If you believe corporate politics is something for ‘those dirty managers’ think again. Everybody behaves in a political way when a limited amount of resources has to be divided over groups of people. Come play our game and experience firsthand how dirty a politician you are!
It has behooved the XP Days Benelux conference to allow playing of devious political games in its program. Join Emmanuel Gaillot and me on November 23 or 24 so that you can (re)find the (dirty?) politician in you.
“Cheney Satan ‘08″ by futureatlas.com
Photo found through Photo Suggest
Continue reading ‘Agile Politics – (re)discover the politician in you at XP Days Benelux’
I was getting really frustrated about some online discussion today. It seemed other people were getting even more upset than I was (and even that is just one of many possible interpretations. I know from experience that the more frustrated I am, the less reliable my interpretations are). Instead of blowing off steam by firing of a blog post in frustration… which would let steam off on my end but could potentially multiply frustration elsewhere, I stumbled across Habits & strategy for effective listening by David Parnell. and decided to write publish on that instead. Tips for listening in a discussion can be just as useful when reading a discussion. Continue reading ‘Until cooler heads prevail – some things that let me calm down when reading online discussions’
Marc already has the scoop, details and a pretty word cloud to explain the theme, so I’ll keep it short and simple. The next Agile Open conference in the Netherlands will be September 10 & 11, in Baarn.
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..).
Jurgen Appelo writes in Communication = Information * Relationships that “top-down systems thinking is a management fad“. I agree. Systems thinking works only if it happens in all directions at once. It seems to work when a group of people is doing systems thinking in the same room at the same time. All combined, these people bring the perspectives that are necessary to come up with changes that work. Continue reading ‘Bottom Up Systems Thinking’
The new year seems to be an excellent time to think about your time management. It seemed to be for mine, and around new year I was chatting with Marc. Marc said “I’m reading a new book on personal productivity”. That made me think. Marc is one of the most productive people I know, so why would he bother reading yet another book like that. He has many, and I knew him since before he had any of those or was into, say methodology. Then, just like now, he is one of the most productive people I know.
“So, why bother?” I asked him.
“I’m productive, but I would like to do it with less stress”. I can understand that. And then I thought that by thinking about more productivity and less stress, you might achieve they opposite. I’ve met some very relaxed people. Were they thinking about stress? Probably not. Not thinking about stress may be like not thinking about a banana. You’ve probably read about research where they ask people to not think about something a banana, for instance, and it turns out they think more about it when you ask them not to…
Take Getting Things Done, for instance. The book has as subtitle “the art of stress-free productivity”. I have the book, and have tried it a couple of times. To me, it seems to have too many moving parts. Even if you take just one part, it might cause you stress. For instance, Johanna Rothman just wrote how Inbox zero is hard for her. GTD states that you should end every day with an empty inbox.
I tried that a couple of times, and after a while I could not get it to work either. In the mean time, I was stressing about it, worrying that I was not working to the norm I had set myself… Thus achieving the opposite of what I set out to do.
So, before Marc got around to explaining that The art of getting everything done by putting it off to tomorrow, and the main principles are of his shiny new tool, I came to the conclusion that it might be best for me to eat my own dogfood, and apply to myself what I tend to advise to teams these days:
Reflect, find out what works for you and do more of it (and do some experiments every once in a while to see if something else would work even better).
Trying out another methodology would not work for me at the moment, because, I might be worrying if I was ‘doing it right’. Asking if you’re doing it right is often the wrong questions to ask… And following a methodology to a T might give you more stress, and thus less productivity, instead of the other way around.
So don’t think about stress, I wish you a relaxed day!
I wrote a teaser post about iterative and incremental rebranding of eXperience Agile in September… It’s been four months and almost as many newsletters since then 
. So time to de-tease the blog…
Marc suggested to do part of the upcoming newsletter as a Temperature Reading, so besides getting some information, our readers also learn a technique, and it helps us structuring our own reflection over the past year. It’s been about a year since Marc, Rob and yours truly sat together after xp days london to discuss closer collaboration with courses and coaching (but still as loosely coupled as possible, because we like our independence).
A Temperature Reading has five questions, the order of which you can vary, depending on the context (see Temperature Reading for explanation and the default order, I’m going to do something different here).
Continue reading ‘A QWAN year ’
Nicole Belilos and I are hosting a trial run of our ‘labour turnover – should I stay or should I go’ workshop – we’re going to also run it during agile2008. We’re doing a trial run next tuesday (June 17th) at the office of Topic in Best. contact me or Nicole if you want to join. If you want to know more, read the workshop description, or the full trial description in Dutch (below).
Continue reading ‘tryout labour turnover June 17th’
Willem van den Ende
Profile
Recent Comments