This week I got a phone call from a local school. They had an international ICT Day, and one of their speakers cancelled. They wanted to know if I could take over a talk on PairProgramming. With a little tweeking in my agenda, that was no problem.

I have been talking a lot about PairProgramming, mostly as part of other courses.

I saw two challenges for this course:

1. Keeping students interested is hard.
2. Talking about PairProgramming is like SEX. You can’t learn SEX from a book, you have to experience it to understand it.

So I created a slidedeck in PresentationZen style, that should help for one.

I requested (and got) another hour, where the students will do Programming in Pair. (should help with challenge 2)

(Oh yes I know books about sex can help you to become a better lover, that is also why I do talk about PairProgramming)

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

Last year at a number of agile conferences I had similar conversations were I wondered why we had so little negative experience reports at agile conferences.

I know that there are agile projects that are failing. I’m convinced that when you do an agile project, you will see problems earlier. Some companies might decide at that moment that the problems are too high and stop the project. Ok that is debatable if that is negative agile experience.

I also know some companies that don’t get the agile way of working or can’t handle the visibility. Or agile isn’t the right tool for that project.

Why don’t we see these in experience reports?

Instead of complaining, I decided to do such a report myself. So this year for the XP Days Benelux conference I had a proposal about a project I worked on that did not so well.

Writing the session description worked pretty well. Finding some people to help me out with the talk, that was also not a problem. And then came the time I wanted to work on the session. I chewed on my session for about a month, actually it felt more like I chocked on it. Mmm, strange. Something was blocking me. I could not figure out where I was blocking myself. So one day I decide to ask my coach for help, on my next appointment.

That same evening I had a big argument with my partner. As this always is when I’m chocking on something, I suddenly saw a link between this argument and my block.

The exact argument with my wife was not important (is it ever?) In the retrospective we had later that evening (yes we do a debrief of our arguments from time to time) she made me realize I was always talking positive about ex-partners. If it are business-partners or ex-lovers, I keep talking positive about them even when we don’t see each other anymore.

Now let’s be clear, there is a reason why I don’t work together anymore with certain companies. And with these ex-lovers, we did split up because we realized we were not compatible. And while I’m still in that situation, I will rant about these people too my close friends as much as the next girl/guy.

Once I moved on, I will not say negative things about that person anymore. Certainly not in public.
When I was giving .Net training, I did use examples of spaghetti code or other non clean code, I never mentioned the name of the company, project or developer. (I did not see the point, it would not make my point any clearer.)

So that evening I realized that is exactly why I could not do my session about that former client. Even if I would translated it to everything I learned, or to things I was not able to do, (as a great coach was suggesting me) it was still blocking me.
Now that is an interesting to learn about myself. So I will definitely look into that with a coach. At this moment I’m not sure when I want to do that. (Oh that is exactly why I should do it now, yes I hear you coaches…) Now I’m not writing this to forcing myself to work on that, I’m writing this because during lunch with another great coach, I realized this is exactly why we don’t see these kind of reports at our conferences.
The coaches in our community value respect for people very high.

So I’m suspecting that is why our community only talks about the good projects.

Yes I know agile coaches talk among themselves about the negative experiences. And JB has a great session about his 10 biggest mistakes. That is not about one project or one client. And he is bringing it from his mistakes. I think that is the only way we will ever see negative experience reports.
Oh and my session, I changed it to a general session about retrospectives, because I realized that was where I made my biggest mistakes on that project.

At last weeks XP Benelux event, when I talked briefly about this with Jef and Peter, they told me that maybe we don’t need these negative reports.

Although I understand, I’m not 100% happy with it.
The reason why I’m not happy with it, is that the anti-agile crowd does not believe the always positive vibe there is in the agile community. And what is more, I hear negative stories about agile that are coming from outside our community. And it’s ok that they tell them when they understand agile. I don’t like it when they blame something on agile, when it is really the company that can’t handle the truth that agile brings out.

I’ll end with an ask for help, do you recognize this, is this a reason why you would not do a negative experience report? Am I missing something?

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

Roy Osherove has asked me if I wanted to blog some guest posts on his 5 why’s blog on the Core protocols.

• my introduction 
• my first post on the check-in protocol.

This link should give you all the post’s I’m blogging there.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

This are the slides from my presentation at AgileTourToronto.

My intention with this talk was to remember my fellow agilists about a lot of the different ways todo retrospectives. Most of the examples come from one of the books on retrospectives. My slides are done presentation zen style, which means they don’t contain a lot of text. When people asked me about hand-outs, I pointed them to the Agile Retrospective book from Esther and Diana. That is a way better hand-out then I could ever make.

I struggled a bit with finding a nice team charter to show. That a feedback I got. So I struggled some more when waiting for my plane home. And then I reviewed some slides about leadership from Deborah Hartman Preuss. I was reading a piece of text I new for a few years. And then lightning struck. That text was one of the best Team Charters I knew.
See slide 14 for the text.

Update: Some people seem to have trouble seeing the presentation in their RSS Reader. Here is the link to the slides on slideshare 

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

This video shows how you can change people’s behavior when you make them have fun.

I’m just back from Toronto where I did two workshops next to AgileTourToronto.
Last day was AgileGameDay. A whole day of playing games to learn serious stuff.

The reasons for me behind these games is similar to what these people want.
Use the brain the way a kid does to learn new behavior.
If you want to learn about agile while having fun, feel free to contact me.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

Have you ever been in a meeting that seems to go on for hours?
Where some people talk like this:

BlahBlahBlah, BlahBlahBlah, I don’t have anything to add to this conversation, but I want to make sure that everyone hears my voice, BlahBlahBlah, so that I’m sure that they value me, BlahBlahBlah, and so that everyone thinks I’m a smart person, BlahBlahBlah, that has something to say, BlahBlahBlah.

Actually I think that the idea that we are discussion here, blahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlah is a great idea, BlahBlahBlahBlahBLahBLahBlahBlahBlah I’m adding a few idea’ on top of it so I look smarter BlahBlahBlahBlahBlah, I support this idea the way it was proposed.

If you have 6 people around the table and we all take 10 minutes talking like that (and yes we all do it), that is 1 hour of lost productivity for 6 people.

That is 6 hours. mmm, maybe we need to have smarter meetings.

Comes along Decider, one of the Core Protocols.

Here are the basic rules: (See page 6 of the Core for all the details )

1. Proposer says “I propose [concise, actionable behavior].”
2. Proposer says “1-2-3.”
3. Voters, using either Yes (thumbs up), No (thumbs down), or Support-it (flat hand), vote
simultaneously with other voters.
 

Let’s use an example:
Situation: I’m hungry, my kids are noisy and my wife is having a bad day.

Yves: I’m proposing that we go out now and eat some French fries. 1-2-3
Yves: Thumbs up (it would be very stupid to vote thumbs down to my own proposal)
Joppe (7 y) : thumbs up
Bent (4 y): thumbs up
Geike (2 y): thumbs up (she doe snot understand it, but she loves to vote yes)
Els: thumbs down

I’m turning to her and ask her: what would it take to get you in?
Els says, I would accept it if we would leave in 15 minutes, so that I have the time to do X
As it is a small change I do a quick eye check with my kids to see if that is OK.
==> Decision taken.

Update:

This technique also works well with a distributed team over chat or E-mail. As I described in a previous post: taking group decisions by e-mail.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

I noticed something strange the last months (year?).

Last year there were lot’s of discussions on agile mailing list about agile vs Agile.
We also had discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of certifications.

David wanted to write a new manifesto.

We had discussion if Lean was agile.
At Agile 2009 there was a Open Space session is Scrum evil?

Ken resigned of the Scrum Alliance he founded (the foundation to support “his” scrum)

Joel writing a post against TDD vs Uncle Bob’s response 
Tobias writing a blog post to stop doing XP.  vs Steve reaction’s to keep doing XP 
(Read Tobias answer in the comments to understand the whole discussion) 
I could add a lot more if I wanted, and so could you.

It looks like we have a lot of discussions where we question ourselves as an industry.

I have the feeling it is the first time this happens at this scale.
Maybe I’m too young. Maybe I ‘m more in the middle now or have more idea’s myself on who’s right or wrong.
Maybe it’s the always connect, twitterly, blogging world that makes these discussions so more public.

This reminds me a lot of the storming phase that exists in a team live cycle,or the chaos phase in Satirs model.
So from a point of view of a coach these discussions and where this goes is interesting.

In these discussions, there is clearly no leader. Or let me put it in another way, no leader that everyone would accept.
So this is a self-organizing team.

Who’s is part of this team?
I guess everyone involved in creating software.
Some are seniors, some are juniors. Some are good in communication others are bad at expressing what they think/feel, but have good idea’s. Some have great idea’s and don’t say/write anything. Some turn of heir browsers and start writing code.

What is the goal of this team?
mmm? That is a hard one, and as long was we don’t have a shared vision, I doubt we will agree on a lot of stuff. Anyway agreeing should never be a goal.
The creation of the agile manifesto was also not done without discussions.

My personal goal would be that we as an industry end up get better at writing great software.

As a coach I’m interested to look at META position and see how me behave as a community. And how the outside world looks at us during these discussions.

Do we scare people away because we argue?
Do we attract people because we listen to each other and argue politly?
Maybe it is too early to ask these questions, and I know that switching to and from meta position can influence the discussions. 

So lot’s of questions. And too much happening that I can take a look at on my own.

So I wonder, what is your idea? How do you feel about this?

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

I have been talking about real life deployment at Flickr for a few years. People have been asking me numbers or places where they could verify what I said.
Problem was I did not remember where I read that Flickr deployed every 3 hours.

Here are the slides.

This video talks about how Developers and Operation work together at Flickr.
I know that Patrick Debois of DevOpsDay will love the one step build, the one step deploy, and one source codebase.
(Just like I do) I know some people of my previous teams would love to hear about this.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

I know some senior developers that don’t like PairProgram with juniors as they slow them down. First of all, the speed of the team (and thus the velocity of the team) is determent by the slowest on the team, not by the fastest.
First reaction could be: let’s throw out these juniors.
At first sight it might be good to only hire smart, seniors developers. We can advance much quicker. Well not exactly true. A lot of senior people have a hard time asking for help. I prefer to bring the juniors up to speed.  

A lot of juniors feel overwhelmed by their senior colleagues. I think a junior has an incredible advantage over most seniors people. They have the advantage of being excused not to know. I blogged before about the TMN acronym.  The questions a junior asks go way beyond this.

And a lot of times some senior’s are happy that someone dares to ask that question.

Unfortunately by the time a junior does not feel overwhelmed anymore,  they might have lost that advantage, and now they might feel that they can no longer ask that question. When I have a junior joining a team I’m coaching, I make sure I explain them that it is OK to ask questions even (or should I say especially) stupid ones. I ‘m saying that I expect it, and that it is part of their job as a junior to ask questions.

I love diversity in my teams. Having a junior that dares to ask stupid questions brings the whole team to a higher level.

The better the juniors on my team do this, the more the seniors start doing this as well and the easier my job as a coach gets. And the faster I can leave this team.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

As an agile coach I do quite some retrospectives. My partner asked me a few days ago how it was possible that a team that did not know me, trusted me to do their retrospective.

What I told her was that it goes much better then when I do a retrospective for a team I’m coaching.  When I am coaching a team, I try to avoid to facilitate the retrospectives of that team. I do this, because I am involved with the team. And when I am involved I want to bring my own opinion.
I consider bringing my own opinion when I facilitate a retrospective, a bad practice.

When I facilitate a  team I don’t coach, (or no longer coach) the team members see me as objective. I don’t let the CEO talk more. I don’t know the history of the team. I can only react to what I see happening. That makes it much easier for me to do a retrospective.

Of course the first retrospective I do with a team, they will test this if I’m neutral.

It’s common sense to be neutral when you facilitate. Another example where common sense is WRONG.
I can’t be neutral. When someone says something, I immediately have feelings.
-Ah that is smart
-Nah that won’t work
-You make me think of an old boss I did not like
-…
==> all these thoughts make me have sympathy or antipathy for the speaker.

For years I wanted to be neutral. Now I came to realize it is not possible. It is politic correct to be neutral. But it is not possible.

When I facilitate I want to have multiple partiality. Being aware what these feelings are, gives me the possibility to have multiple partiality.
And that is something I can.

I’m not sure I have to explain multiple partiality. I’m not sure I can.
It’s all related to the political correct TRUTH. I don’t believe their is one truth.
I believe we all have are truths.
I can believe that your truth is this and that her truth is that. I might have a total different idea of the world. I still respect both truths as a given. 

For me multiple partiality is about respecting all parties the way they are. I can only do this when I understand my sympathies and antipathies.
It’s also one of the reason’s that I think agile coaches should have their own coach. It’s important to have a place where you as a coach can safely talk about your sympathies and antipathies, and to have a person with who you can explore these. At least I need that, because that way I can better understand them. When I better understand my sympathies and antipathies, they won’t drive me.

 I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

After my successful sessions @ Agile2009 & AgileEE, I’m also doing a talk at some of the Agile Tour events:

Agile Tour Geneve (12 october) http://www.agiletour.org/fr/at2009_geneve.html
Agile Tour Toronto (20 october) http://www.agiletour.org/fr/at2009_toronto.html
Agile Tour Bordeaux (29 October) http://agiletour.org/fr/at2009_bordeaux.html

XP Days Benelux (23-24November – Benelux) www.xpday.net  
XP Days London (7-8 December- London) http://www.xpday.org

Going to Toronto for just one day, is pretty

• silly
• dedicated
• expensive
• …

 
So I decided to deliver two Agile Courses in Toronto. In Michael Sahota of agilitrix I found the perfect partner to help me with this.
Both will be given in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Toronto (the same hotel as where the Agile Tour event is taking place)

Agile Kick Start (19/10/2009)
This course is for:

• People who are new to agile
• People who want to prepare for the Agile Tour Toronto
• Certified Scrum Masters that want to learn about that other pillar of the agile called XP
• XP practitioners that want replace some XP practices with other things, without loosing the values behind the practices they replace.
• Agile practitioners that never read the first edition of the famous white Extreme Programming Explained book
• Agile Coaches that have never played the XP Game

Read more

Order here

Agile Games Day (21/10/2009)

Define the Business Value
Fact: Determining the Business Value is an important aspect of an agile project
Fact: Learning that from a book is impossible
Fact: The Business Value Game is the fastest way to learn this

Understand Self-Organizing Teams
Fact: Self-organizational teams are important for agile
Fact: Most people have NO experience with a self-organizing team
Fact: The Leadership Game lets you experience the difference between a command and control, self-organizing and a process led team.

Theory of Constraints
Fact: Every project has a bottleneck that limits productivity
Fact: Most people don’t know how to eliminate a bottleneck to go faster
Fact: The game “I’m not a bottleneck, I’m a free man” will teach you how to apply the Theory of Constraints

Learn Quickly
Fact: Humans learn fastest when they are playing.
Fact: The Agile game day combines 3 famous agile games
Have Fun
Fact: You’ll have fun
Fact: You will learn a lot

This course is for:

– People new to agile.
- Agilists struggling with one of these concepts
- Agile Coaches that look for new ways to explain these concepts to there customers/developers.

The three games have been played all around the world on multiple agile events.
They are now grouped as a one day event for the first time.
Read more

Order here

If you are a participant of Agile Tour Toronto or are on their waiting list, we offer you a discount of 10% when you use this code: 014756401953
Both courses are for a maximum of 20 people. Meals are included.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

On agile conferences and on agile mailing list every once in a while the same question pop’s up:

"What tool should I use to keep track of my team."

I answer this every time again with a question: what are you using right now.I want to know why people want to use a tool. These days there are a lot of nice tools out there that can help you. Before you use a tool, you should figure out why you need a tool.

If your team can’t get itself under control with a whiteboard, no tool will help you to solve that problem.

Yes I know, we are in the software building industry, so we think that every problem we have, can be solved with some software. And if the software does not fix it, then we switch to another software.

I don’t believe that. I think you should first fix the problem, and then find the software that helps you best with your new process.

“Low Tech” is way better to figure out how to work together with your team.

On a whiteboard the information is also much more in your face. If it is online in one of these fancy Agile project Management software, you have to realize that most software developers in your team will not open the software. And if they do, they will not got have a look at those fancy reports every day. They will look at the papers on their whiteboard. Especially when they are discussed during the standup.

Yes Yves you are right, but that won’t work for our distributed team.
When I started with my first distributed team (2005), I read everywhere that agile and distributed teams could not work together. I did not agree. I worked fine with our distributed team.

Today we have distributed agile experts and they claim (And I agree) that if you want/have to work distributed agile is the only/best way.
When I started with that first distributed team, I look around at some of the agile tools, I did not find any of them that really was good for what we wanted to do.
I have played around with whiteboard and different techniques on how to communicate the information with the team.

My favorite at this moment: 
This works best with two subteams that are of similar size.

Have a whiteboard on either side. Hold a daily standup on both sides. Everyone states his own tasks, like he would do with a collocated team. On top of that everyone also states the work of his buddy on the other side. So everyone has a buddy in the other sub-team. Before the standup, they explain to each other what they have done.
Extra advantage: because for some people it is a kind of rehearsal of what they will say, the people in the team are much more focused while they speak during the standup.
This way you have a whiteboards that is up-to-date on both sides. And you have every member of your team that has a very close communication with one a person on the other side. Which is very good for the teamspirit. When you rotate your buddy’s every week or so, you can create a much bigger binding in your team then you usually have with a distributed team.
When you work like that you don’t need a software tool to spread that information in a distributed team. And you get a much healthier team on top of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these tools don’t bring any value. I’m saying that you should not replace your whiteboard with software, only because you work distributed.

Oh and if the excuse is that these board look to unprofessional, read Xavier’s blog on Visual management to upgrade your whiteboard to look more professional. I “stole” the picture from his blog.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

It all started with this tweet from J.B. Rainsberger:

jbrains I consider never using the phrase "best practice" a best practice. #wcr09

I RT this, just like many other people.

I like to think I immediately understood what JB mend.
For me it what it means is that, from the moment people start to call something a Best Practise, it blocks them. (or worse) and it blocks other people.

What Best Practice really means is: this is the Best practice at this moment and under these circumstances.
How people use Best practice is: You have to do it like this, and don’t change anything. It is a proven technique, don’t change it, we know better then your situation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Best practices, as long as they don’t limit me to work in a better way.

And then a few hours later, I realized that my slides for my AgileEE talk had ton’s of Best Practises slides.
Mmm, if I really don’t want my audience to take my idea’s and use what ever they want and adapt them, I should find a better word then BEST Practice.

It took me a few iterations of my slides. At this moment I ended up with great practices instead of BEST Practices.
So I’m actually proposing we stop using the word BEST practice and we start talking about great practices.

What do you think, it is a better idea then the use of BEST practice?

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

As I had a problem with my timer, I skipped the video of Agile Hitler during my talk.
For the people that saw my talk,it should have come before the slide with the responsibility of Christopher Avery. (I wanted people to realize they saw examples of the not taking responsibility in the video).

For the first iteration of a talk it was OK. But I’m not happy that I went over time. I hate it when speakers don’t respect the timeslot.

I should have asked for help to ask how much time I had left. Bummer. I ‘m talking about asking for help, and I my actions show how hard it is. Now I have an example for the Right Wrongs slide.

Will you do a perfection game of the slides/talk?

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

At the Agile 2009 conference, Jared M. Spool used this video during his keynote.
It was how Apple envisioned the future in the 1980’s.

Jared said Apple used that video internally to take decisions.

Remember this was invisioned before the internet existed, even before cellphone’s.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company .net or follow me on Twitter

While I’m missing  Agile Open Holland today, time to reflect on the Conferences I do go to.

I will be talking at Agile Eastern Europe about leadership (18-20 Sep 2009 Kiev)
http://www.agileee.org/

The same talk I will be giving on the Agile Tour in Geneve (12 october 2009)
http://www.agiletour.org/fr/at2009_geneve.html

Agile Tour Toronto
I get a lot of mails from their wiki. The perfection games are well on their way. Deadline is today.
http://agiletour.org/fr/at2009_toronto.html
http://www.torontoagilecommunity.org/

Agile Tour China (24 October 2009 Chengdû)
I have proposed my Leadership game, I’m not sure what are the visa regulations to go to China, so I will probably not go there.
http://agiletour.org/fr/at2009_chengdu.html

Agile Tour Bordeaux (29 October 2009)
After the successful playing of the leadership game at Agile 2009, my leadership game got accepted here.
http://agiletour.org/fr/at2009_bordeaux.html

Devopsdays ‘09 30 & 31 October, Ghent, Belgium
the conference that tries to get the best of both dev and ops world.
two days of fun and interesting talks.
I haven’t decided yet if I go to this one. The organizer Pascal Debois is a very passionate guy, that I like very much. The idea of putting developers and system administrators together I love. Its not really an agile conference, but it definitely will be a great event. If I be here or not will depend of the project I will be doing at that moment.
http://www.devopsdays.org/

Improvisation for Agile Coaches (21 November 2009 London To be confirmed)
As this is so close to the XP Days in Benelux, I’m not sure I’ll make it to this.
http://www.agilecoachesgathering.org/wiki/index.php/Home

XP Days Benelux (23-24November 2009 Mechelen)
The program has not been announced yet. Even if none of my 3 sessions are accepted I will be here.
www.xpday.net

XP Days London (7-8 December 2009- London)
Nothing announced here. I will also go there even when no sessions get accepted. 
http://www.xpday.org

Oh and somewhere in between there might be an Agile Coaches Camp tour be organized. Not sure if that idea still lives after Agile 2009.

This are just the agile conferences I’m going to. Check out this Agile Conference google calendar for more:

http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/hanoulle.be/embed?src=hanoulle.be_vhhuilrdov5hiodkhauquvp7eg%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Brussels

If you want to add a conference to this calendar, ask me.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company  .net or follow me on Twitter

Agile Coaching is the book I wish I had read when I started coaching my first team. While agile is spreading fast, a lot of people take on coaching roles, these people finally have a book to find the answer for their questions.
The book Rachel & Liz wrote is not only good for people new to coaching, as a seasoned coach, I found some new idea’s (Standup Checkov), it refreshed rusted idea’s (ping pong programming), and challenged some other (no comments). This is one of the books I know I will at least skim (probably read) once a year. Liz and Rachel assembled an enormous amount of tips to help you coach (agile) teams.
If you read one book about coaching it should be this one. If you want to read more, you will find in the book the necessary info on where to find more detail about a topic. (Although they have found a way to explain most idea’s at least as good as the original author.) On top of all this, while reading the book, it was as if Rachel and Liz where right beside me to help me with all their experience.
This was a book I was waiting for.

Buy it at the pragmatic programmers site or Amazon.com (Amazon.fr for my French readers)

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company  .net

On the last day of Agile 2009 in Chicago I played the leader game in Open Jam.
This was the first time I played it in Open Space.

I was afraid that people would not show up or walk away. They did show up and instead of people walking of, more people joined.

(To be exact some people warned me up front they would not be able to play for 3 hours as they had to catch a plane.)

The fact that people stayed to finish the game, reminded me of the edition at the first XP Day Paris,

where the players refused to go to the closing note of the XP day. They preferred to hear all their colleagues remarks.

We have already played this to a lot of different people, like medical students. This was the first time, we had a minor playing the game. And a courageous one too. Kevin volunteered to be one of the coaching leaders. Unfortunately he had to leave before the feedback. Which is one of he most important part of the game (especially for the leaders.). Anyway it took a lot of guts to do that which a bunch of hard headed geeks.

This is also the first time that people used the internet to look up pictures of the monument they wanted to build.

Open Jam was a nice place to play this, the enthusiasm of the players attracts more players. The bad thing is that there was too much noise in the Open Jam for the meetings and the retrospective part of the game. Anyway I was happy with this edition of the game and I received nice feedback from people I have big respect for.

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

My three questions:

1 What have I finished yesterday.

2 What do I commit to finish today

3 Where do I need help?

==>So these are a little bit different as the ones from Jean.

I don’t make the link between what I promised yesterday and what I have done yesterday. Because it might be that I have done something totally different. If it is there is a smell. I could answer her question and not talk about other stuff I have done. (Difficult to know Jean’s idea in a 4 minute video).
My question also does not tackle the smell directly. It does offer the team to react if what is said yesterday and today is not in sync.

With 2, I completely agree with Jean. It’s about commitment, not just about what will I try to do. I’ m only interested in what you want to finish today.

My 3 is bigger then Jean’s. I don’t need to be stuck to need help. Actually I want team members to ask quicker for help. Before they actually get stuck.

Also it avoids the difficult definition of ’stuck’. (Some people only see them selfs stuck when they don’t find a solution for a week…)

Next to that I agree completely with Jean. If you want more advice like that, read her great book about facilitating an agile team:

Collaboration Explained

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

Esther Derby gave a great presentation @ Agile 2009 called Performance without Appraisals: what to do about performance reviews.

In this TED talk, Daniel Pink quote’s some research that proves why appraisals don’t work for Information Workers.

Vera Peters and myself gave a workshop in London on the same topic. You can find the (very nice) slides here.

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

Almost a year after the last European BootCamp I’m organizing another one.

In my (obviously biased) opinion, BootCamp is the best way to learn how to create team’s.
Jim & Michele McCarthy started doing Bootcamps when they left Microsoft, now 15 years ago.

The idea was to create a course were people would learn how to create a team. They did that in an experimental way. The students would not be instructed, they were asked to deliver a project by the end of the week. Sometimes the students were an existing team, sometimes hey had never met.

During the first few Bootcamps, they noticed that the students came up with a lot of similar idea’s on how to create a team. So Jim & Michele started writing down these idea’s. And they gave these idea’s to he next team.

They have now done this for 15 years.
This resulted in a few things

• One is the free download of the Core Protocols.
• The other is he manual of BootCamp and BootCamp itself.
• There also is a Coaches and a Trainer manual. This makes it possible to reproduce BootCamp.

I was part of 5 one week BootCamps. In each of these I saw a team that by the end of the week had a shared vision and was delivering on time.

Typically students do 3 or more iterations during a BootCamp. The first one they might miss or they might deliver something not great. Every bootcamp I was part of (as a student, coach or instructor), by the end of the week, the students were one team and they delivered a great product on time.

I know it is hard to believe. It is also something that is hard to explain. I just know that if you use the Core Protocols, you end up with a great team.

As the Core is free, you can do that on your own. I needed a bootcamp to have the courage to start using them.
So this next bootcamp offers you the possibility to learn how I create teams.

So open up your agenda, free up 11 till 16 October 2009.
And subscribe on the PairCoaching.net website.

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

One thing people are never good at, is seeing how others see them. Ine explained this some time ago with some more words (dutch blog post)

Yep. As I am coaching both team’s and individuals I agree.
Do I have a coach? Yes I have had several coaches the last years. At this moment I have one that coaches me on a weekly basis.  And I know coaches that I can reach out if I need to. (Which I do from time to time when I look for specific advise.)

Do you have a coach?

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

To my big surprise I have not been blogging about the upcoming Agile conferences.

I’ll be going to Agile 2009 in Chicago. This is the agile conference to be.
Neatly organized by different stages like festivals.

Unfortunately this year non of my sessions got accepted; Oh well leave’s me more time to follow other sessions and network.

If you are going to this one, orif you have been to any of the earlier ones and you are on linkedin, feel free to join the Linkedin Agile 200X group.

Next to that I’ll be speaking at the first Agile East European Conference in Kiev.
I love helping out new agile conferences. I spoke at the very first XPday France (in 2006) and I haven’t missed one since.

I have also proposed a few session on XPDay Benelux. I will do also for Xp Day London and I’m considering a lot of the Agile Tours cities.

Am actually also thinking about the Agile Testing days that are taking place in Germany and Belgium, Agile Open Holland, Agiles 2009. If you know of other agile conferences feel free to contact me.

Oh and this year I have created an agile conferences calendar on google. E-mail me if you want to add it to your calendars, so that you won’t miss any agile conference.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

Yesterday I receive this e-mail:

Dear friends,

Sorry to bother you, but I’m asking for your advice on the following
matter.  My company is engaged in a project that is losing money.
It’s a fixed-scope, fixed-money and we’ve badly underestimated the
effort required.  For the record, we started in May last year, and we
estimated it would be over in a year.  My current estimate for
completion is around March-June 2010, depending on how many people we
leave on the team.  Currently we are staffing 6 people, but the
original plan called for 4 people.

Yet the customer insists on paying us the fixed amount, and we’re
losing money badly.  The people on the team is discouraged; there is
no end in sight.  Our customer’s customer is also angry because of the
delays.  The only good thing is that we managed to keep the developers
working regular hours.

On Monday I’m going to have a Difficult Conversation with the
customer.  I’m going to ask them to convert the current fixed-scope
project into a variable-scope one.  I will tell them:

“Dear customer, the amount of money that you are still to give to us,
according to the plan, will allow us to keep this team going for about
15 weeks, working barely above cost.  We’ll do everything you need on
this project, for this time, so that we reach most of your major
business objectives.  After those 15 weeks, we’re even, and any
remaining scope will have to be done with a new contract, or possibly
with a new supplier.”

I’m going to list the following advantages:

* No more bickering about change requests; we’ll do everything you
need, in priority order.
* We’ll start splitting stories aggressively so that we can get the
most important functionality working, cherry-picking it from the whole
remaining scope.
* Working in a more focused way we can probably obtain most of the
business value you expected, since 15 weeks is a lot of time.
* Therefore, we’ll give you the maximum possible value for the money
that you originally intended to spend.

They are not going to like this; they are very much of the mind that
“it was your estimation error, so you must pay for your errors.”  My
view is that we’re working full time, with competent people, dedicated
full time to the project, so if we’re taking so long it’s mostly
because the project is complex.  It’s their product we’re building
after all; when all is said and done, they will have a product, and
we’ll only have the loss.

What I’m not comfortable with is, what to do if they refuse to see it
this way.  I’m thinking along the lines of,

“I’m sorry; if you refuse to cooperate, and bind us to this contract,
we’ll stick to the letter of the contract.  We’ll keep no more than 4
people on the project, we’ll take as much time as it takes, we’ll pay
our penalties and not worry anymore about your deadlines.  Also, we’ll
start doing things strictly according to the spec, and we’ll refuse to
do anything that is not in the spec.  If what we build is not what
your customer needs, then we’re sorry but it’s not our problem.”

I’m not comfortable with that, because it will be hell for the
developers, and it will possibly lead to the customer dumping us and
not pay us anyway.  And I don’t like to threaten anyone.  This course
will probably lead to great losses for both parties.

The other option would be to threaten to walk away from the project
right now; this would also lead to litigation and great losses for
both parties.  My boss does not approve of this possibility.

So I’m asking; what would you do in my place?  What would you say
when/if the customer refuses to agree to put a cap on our losses and
accept a variable scope project?

Thanks,

My scariest idea :

- Ask for help from the customer.

My less scary idea:

I guess that this team got into this trouble because they have created and delivered functionality that was not initially agreed upon. That in itself is normal. It is actually good to give the customer what he wants. I’s my guess that the problem in this situation is that the team did not remove other functionality. So now they deliver new stuff and the originally requested functionality. And then they go over budget.

So I advised this person to get a list of things they have added based on customer demand.

With that list they could now negotiate:

1 The customer pays extra for these extra features
2 Remove other initially features that are not yet developed.
3 Remove the extra features (not interesting for both parties)

These idea’s about fixed time and budget agile projects are based on two articles from Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. If you do fix price projecs, make sure you read these:

http://www.nayima.be/html/fixedpriceprojects.pdf
http://www.nayima.be/html/agilefixedprice.pdf

That are my idea’s. As this is a very tricky situation and I’m pretty sure some of my readers are smarter then me, feel free to e-mail me or post a comment with your idea’s.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can mail me: blog at my training company  .net

As founder of PairCoaching.net I ‘m very interested in the work that was done by two people.
When I go to a conference and I have to select between two sessions, if one of them is delivered by 2 or more people, I select that one;
Because I know the chance that this delivers movre value is a lot higher then one delivered by one presenter.
If it’s an agile conference and one of the presenters is Rachel Davies  I don’t second guess my choice:  every session I have followed by Rachel has been an eye-opener.
So when I heard her book was available, I ordered it right away.
A book on “Agile coaching”, by Rachel and a PairCoach? What more did I need?

When I flipped to the pages I loved some of the advice Rachel and Liz gave:

* use the Pomodore technique.
* read one book a month. If you use my 30 pages a day tip, you can read this one in a week.
* Get a coach

I only looked briefly in the book and I’m already happy I bought it.

I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at blog at my training company  .net

I’m prepping a FishBowl about leadership for XP Day France 2009.

This video is a perfect example of the kind of controversial statements I want the participants to discuss about.

Yves Hanoulle

The word of today is cyberella: IT women. I never heard of the word, but I like it.

Yves

In the middle of a team restructure (downsizing), a few ill kids, a large personal todo list for upcoming agile conferences, a heavy Gestalt training year, I get an e-mail from my former collegue Xavier, that he stared a new blog about Visual Management.
I was not surprised, as Xavier lives and breaths Visual Management.

If you care about agile, lean, scrum, XP and want to see how you can sell these whiteboards to upper management. Check out this blog.

Yves Hanoulle