Partnership & Possibilities

Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills
Dec 11-13, 2007
Register here.

Are you ready to take your Agile team to the next level?

Beyond technical skills, Agile success depends on productive self-organizing teams. How do you develop, grow, and maintain a functioning self-organizing team? It’s not magic, but it doesn’t just happen either. Effective self-organizing teams rely on personal and interpersonal effectiveness. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll discover the secrets to developing the skills you need to succeed and lead on a self-organizing team.

Facilitators Diana Larsen and Esther Derby

Audience Team leaders, team coaches, XP coaches, ScrumMasters and other software professionals leading and working in teams.

Pre-requisites A desire to be best team member or team leader possible.

Benefits Team members will learn to:
• Improve the quality of interactions with customers and others outside the team
• Increase the speed and effectiveness of feedback
• Contribute to an environment for team success

Course Outline
1. Communication and Interactions
2. Navigating Conflict
3. Feedback and practice
4. Shared Leadership
5. Forming Teams
6. Personal and Organizational Change
7. Transition to Work
Registration Workshop registration fee for the three-day workshop is $1200. To ensure the optimal workshop experience for everyone, registration is limited to no more than 3 individuals from the same organization. Register here.

Register Early To encourage the highest quality learning and interaction, attendance in this workshop is limited to 12 participants. When the list of registered participants reaches 12, we will start a short waiting list in case of last minute cancellations. Register here.

Time The workshop begins at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, December 11, 2007, and continues with day and evening sessions through 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 13, 2007.

Location We have reserved the school library and an adjoining classroom at The Kennedy School in Portland, OR, for our workshop sessions.

We have arranged for a block of rooms in the hotel for our workshop participants. Deadline for reserving a guaranteed room at the hotel is November 9, 2007. Please mention FutureWorks Consulting/The Secrets of Agile Teamwork when reserving your room.

The hotel is located 4 miles (about 10 minutes) from Portland International Airport, within easy walking distance (.5 – 1.5 miles) of the Alberta Arts District with numerous shops and restaurants available, and near a pharmacy and supermarket for incidental purchases.

Who doesn’t love Orlando in December? I’m speaking at the brand new SQE Agile Development Practices conference, December 3-6. Who knows maybe we’ll find time to sneak off to go hang out with the Big Mouse too? Sing together, “M-I-C….K-E-Y, Why? Because we like you!…”

Naresh Jain pledged to connect the dots between Agile practitioners around the world. Today he wrote a post about it. He’s taken another step (in addition to convening the SDT conference and conferences around India) by creating a group on LinkedIn. Dear Reader, if you’re an Agile Alliance member who would like to connect with other practitioners, and you have a profile on LinkedIn, you can join the group.

See you at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference, Nov. 4-7, in Phoenix, AZ. I’m presenting three sessions there and looking forward to meeting other folks interested in living and working in effective human systems.

A third Agile Open has sprouted! To follow the success of Agile Open Northwest last January, which built on the work of Willem van den Ende, Marc Evers, and Nynke Fokma who gave us Agile Open in Europe, now we have Agile Open California! Attendees will explore the theme of “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream.”

Agile and Open Space Technology, what a match made in heaven! Self-organizing rules! The word spreads….

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference October 8-10, 2007 in Portland Oregon. (I’ve only been involved for the past five years.) One of the best conferences there is for developers, testers and other folks concerned with the quality of their software. And I’m planning the Monday night ice-breaker social!

Just back from JAOO 2007 and I have too much to write about. What a great conference!

Lucky for me, in two weeks I’ll get to attend another great conference, PNSQC, in it’s 25th anniversary edition. Twenty-five years of focusing on building quality software. And it’s not just for testers and QA people anymore. Since the Agile movement has gained momentum, developers and applications directors and such folks have also embraced the idea that software can roll out the door to the customers in a ready-to-use, defect-free form. Y’all come to PNSQC.

But that’s not what I want to write about today. While I was off gallivanting around Scandinavia, right here in Portland innovations were afoot. I received a question from a QA manager, and retrospective fan, about using the Fishbone Diagram activity - one of the activities we mention in Agile Retrospectives (see sidebar) for Generating Insights during a retrospective.

He wanted to remember the classic, minimalist, four-bones for creating the diagram. Traditional “bones” often used in manufacturing quality circles were: “man, machine, methods, materials”. Over time, those analysis categories had been replaced for use off the machine floor by: “people, product, process, and…….” and the manager couldn’t remember the last “p”. (If you check the wikipedia article, you’ll discover 6-, 9- and more-boned versions. IMHO, too many for most software teams to sit through in one short iteration retrospective.)

From the 9-hour time-zone lag between me in Denmark and him in Portland, I wrote back to fill in the traditional fourth P, “Plant”, which includes things like equipment, ergonomics and other work environment characteristics.

Alas! My reply came too late for his retrospective meeting.

Today I heard from him that he had innovated a new P for the model, “protocol”. Sheer genius! Of course, if we are looking at problem-solving from a systems-thinking perspective (and we are, aren’t we?), we must include a way to look at organizational systems to discover how they also might impact the issue at hand.

So, in his honor, I propose an addendum to the Fishbone Diagram that I’m calling the Savage Corollary, after my QA colleague. From henceforth, every time I lead a team in a Fishbone analysis looking for the root causes of impediments to their progress, we will have five, not four, bones on our “fish.”

People, Product, Process, Plant, and (ta-da!) Protocol.

People: anything to do with the humans involved in the issue - with Kerth’s Prime Directive firmly in mind, of course - we look at how people were assigned or recruited to the team, skills, training provided, experience, and other human factors.

Product: features, elements, intentions, deliverables, stories, etc., about the product that contribute to the issue.

Process: work processes, methods, engineering practices, and so forth.

Plant: As above. The setting in which the work gets done.

Protocol: the impact of organizational systems, policies, procedures, hierarchies and the ways in which they interact and intersect.

I’m speaking at JAOO this year. (JAOO = java and object-oriented) I’ll speak about Agile Retrospectives and hold space for the Scrum Open Space there.

The latest Agile Chronicles Newsletter email edition offered me the option of downloading the second Annual “State of Agile Development” survey. Seventeen hundred individuals responded to a boatload of questions from VersionOne. In response to the question, “Which of the following practices do you employ within your Agile methods? (check all that apply)”, thirty-nine percent checked “retrospectives.” 39%!

Imagine my dismay.
I didn’t expect that every Agile team would hold retrospectives. I’m not sure there’s any practice that every team employs. However, as I’ve said in an earlier post, retrospectives serve a critical role in developing and sustaining Agile teams and projects.

So, to the other 61% of you, what are you waiting for?

Erik Petersen posted a note on his blog that referenced a website for, of all things, a bicycle touring group that needs to run effective meetings.

Lori Walter, writer of the “Guides: Meeting Facilitation”, describes a technique for managing the flow of conversation when facilitating a session where a group/team needs to think together. I can imagine it working well in a retrospective where the need for consensus on action is high as well as the contention about which direction to take the team. She calls it the Levi Hand Signal Technique.

Walter says, “LHST allows meeting participants to register their intent to make two distinct kinds of comments: those that are directly in response to someone else’s comment (’reactive comments’) and those that are separate thoughts (’unique comments’).” And she goes on to describe a “twinkling system”: …” a way for people to signal their agreement with what is being said without having to all put up their hands” which reminds me of the patterns community system of agreement, “GUSH!”

Check it out!