[VOORNAAM], we wish you an aware enjoying of a great 2008.
Let's start with our personal new year resolution...

SearchCIO says �Agile development going mainstream, but care is needed�
Pascal wrote about David Anderson on Trust at XP evening event.
Sally Elatta wrote about the Top Eight Reasons Why Organizations Are Making the Switch
Ben Ellinger talked about Reboot (BootCamp)
Kan Mar wrote about the upcoming Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Coach programme 
Yves wrote 7 tips to compensate your agile team
Dean Leffingwell wrote about Ideal Training for Enterprise-Scale Agility?

Prosource the improvement authority is offering a lot of agile courses this year.
Check out their Certified Scrum Master course, delivered by Boris Gloger
from 28/02/2008 till 29/02/2008

And Action 28/03/2008 Interactive workshop that makes the link between creativity and Improvisation Theatre
 
Scrum Gathering 2008: From 14/04/2008 till 16/04/2008 Chicago

MindMapping 15/04/2008 COCD

CREA conference from 16/04/2008 till 2004/2008 Italia
 
XPDay.fr: From 12/05/2008 till 13/05/2008 Paris (No public announcements yet)

Agile Coach Camp: From 30/05/2008 till 01/06/2008 Michigan
Pushing the Boundaries while Keeping Agile Simple
What's New? What's Missing? What's too Complex? What's Obsolete?

Agile 2008: From 04/08/2008 till 08/08/2008 Toronto Submit your session proposals to get feedback and a chance to revise your submission before their deadline on February 25th!

We have updated our course calendar for 2008.
Just like last year we welcome you to organize in house versions of our courses.
We have renamed the McCarthy BootCamp to Reboot to Team 2.0
This better addresses what it really is: the best course to learn how to create great teams. Teams that deliver on time every time.

Do you want a customized workshop? For only &euro 2.490 we train 10 people.
[&euro 99 for each extra person (maximum 20 people).]

Please call Yves at +32 46 43 38 32 if you are interested in this offer.

Check our website for other discounts.

Or do you need on the job coaching? Our coaches or project leaders can help your team to become truely agile.

XPDay Benelux, XPDay London, XPDay Germany are over. Lot�s of energy, lot�s of people & fun learning experiences. Find stories and pictures here. The result of the feedback forms can be found here.
Some people asked about a list of books lying around. You can find my list at my trainers page on the paircoaching website, or my big old Libarything catalog.

Dave Nicolette wrote about the Nine-boxes of solution selling.
Corey Ladas writes about 2 different ways of treating bugs in a kanbas system.
David Anderson wonders "How big can an effective standup meeting be?" Pretty big if you see his picture.
David is coming to Belgium for JavaPolis and XP Belgium has asked him to do an BOF Session. He agreed to give:
Building a high trust culture in your software engineering organisation . For the record: you don't have to go to JavaPolis if you want to go to (t)his session. Subscribing on this page is all you have to do.
Dilbert is writing about agile. Although I don't agree with how he presents agile, Dilbert stays Dilbert. I see it as something positive: as I think the same as Eventyr : this means we are going beyond early adopters.
Also check out the Top Ten Agile analogies

This month I want to focus on our Getting Things Done in IT course.
We have created this workshop based David Allen�s book with the same title and the sub title �The Art of stress free productivity�.
Lot�s of people at XPDay Benelux loved Laurent�s workshop �Agile as a lifestyle�.
If you missed it or want more of this, we have it.
During this practical workshop you will organize your life. 
Read more
Trainers: Yves Hanoulle, Bernard Vander Beken

Date: 12 December
Place: Ghent - Belgium
Price: &euro 390 /person &euro 2490 /10 persons
Book now

1 . My projects effortlessly complete on schedule and in budget every time.
2. Every team I�ve ever been on has shared vision.
3. In meetings, we only ever do what will get results.
4. No one here blames �management�, or anyone else, if they don�t get what they want.
5. Everybody here shares their best ideas right away.
6. Ideas are immediately unanimously approved, improved, or rejected by the team.
7. Action on approved ideas begins immediately.
8. If we avoid conflict it goes away.
9. I do everything myself. I don�t need to work with others and I have no customers.
10. I prefer crisis, inefficiency, and unresolved conflict � it gives me something to talk about over dinner.
Read more
Trainers: Vickie Gray, Paul Reeves, Yves Hanoulle

Date: 24 February 2008 - 28/02/2008
Place: Kappele-Op-Den-Bos (Mechelen) Belgium
Price: &euro 3900 /person &euro 24900 /10 persons
Book now

Looking for other courses? Or do you need a coach on your project?

Yves Hanoulle, Project-Coach
+32 476 43 38 32
www.PairCoaching.net

Dear [VOORNAAM],

Please find here the lastest newsletter from PairCoaching.net.

Early registration has ended for XP Days Benelux (http://www.xpday.net) and the conference is filling up. We expect to have a sold out conference again.
If you or your friends and colleagues have not registered yet, don't hesitate too long to secure your place.
When all places are booked, we will put further registrations on a waiting list. If someone cancels, the people on the waiting list can register on a first come, first served basis.
See you at the conference,

The next meeting of the xp.be group will be hosted by Javapolis on December 10th 2007.
David Anderson, author of "Agile Management for software engineering"
will present a session about "Building a high trust culture in your software engineering organisation".
The session will be held as one of the BoFs of the conference from 19:00

More info and registration on the wiki

Is holding Agile Development in de praktijk on 14 november. It is similar to our Agile Kick start course. Both are giving from a different angel.

The Whiteboard Whisperer: Working Remotely for Microsoft
Can You Focus On Work At Home?
Can I Find Someone To Let Me Work From Home?
Can You Communicate Effectively From Home?
Can You Communicate Effectively From Home During Meetings?
What Are the Consequences?
Misc Tips & Tricks
The Future of Telecommuting

Kyles Cordes has published a list of 14 tools for a productive Distributed team 

On Brussels Girl Geek Dinner Clo announced that PairCoaching.net wants to stimulate training for women. We are now offering a 15% discount on all our courses for women.

While we are having our BootCamp in Koningsteen, we are organizing a FREE evening about the Core Protocols. This way we offer everyone the possibility to have their own Team 2.0
If you are not at Microsoft�s European Tech-ed and want to learn how you can optimize your team, using some new team protocols. Be sure to book here.
Trainers: Vickie Gray, Paul Reeves

Date: 8 November
Place: Koningsteen (Kappele-op-den-bos)
Price: &euro 0 /person &euro 0/10 persons
Book now 

Avoid wasting time by doing less than two minute actions immediately.
Know where you go by defining desired results.
Make tasks executable by specifying next actions.
Store details from your life and work into a trusted system, so you can focus on what is important. 
Read more
Trainers: Yves Hanoulle, Bernard Vander Beken

Date: 12 December
Place: Holiday Inn Flanders Expo (Ghent - Belgium)
Price: &euro 390 /person &euro 2490 /10 persons
Book now 

Looking for other courses? Or do you need a coach on your project?

Yves Hanoulle, Project-Coach
+32 476 43 38 32
www.PairCoaching.net

XP.be and XP.nl have announced the program for the Benelux XP Days 2007 (see www.xpday.be)
Several PairCoaching trainers were selected to deliver trainings:
� �Whatchoo talking about� [Communication game] with Yves Hanoulle & Ignace Hanoulle
� XP Loops with Vera Peeters & Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
� Where does it hurt? Interviewing techniques to really understand your customer with Pascal Van Cauwenberghe & Bernard Vander Beken
� Frictions / creations What�s at stake with Incremental Design with Emmanuel Gaillot & Bernard Notarianni
� Security Architecture with Johan Peeters, Andre Marien, Maarten Van Hoorenbeek

There is a some discussion going on in the agile community around self-organizing teams & the leadership that goes with it. In our Leadership day (In its current format first played at XPday.be 2005) we let you play with different kinds of leadership styles, so you can decide yourself what best fits you and your team.

� Based on customer feedback we are now offering our Agile Kick Start course in open format. It's the perfect course to learn about agile concepts from Extreme Programming or scrum. Read more or order 28/03/2007
� Do you create MindMaps? We made a deal with Mindjet: our students get a free version of MindMapper Lite 7 (Value 79 euro)
� You no longer have to pay with paypal to enjoy the 1 month prepayment discount
� Rachel published an article on Agile Retrospectives in Methods and Tools
� I'm starting a 4 year Gestalt Therapy Course this weekend to become a better coach. 
� We have now added the last blog items to the trainers personal pages. We also added a list of our favorite books.

[VOORNAAM], are you (or [ORGANISATIE]) having trouble finding people? Why not optimize your current team?
In BootCamp (Aka Team 2.0) Jim and Michele McCarthy will learn your team how to perform at least 10% better. 

People who have been a the top, will work to be there again. 
Do you know Kim Clijsters? She is was a top 10 tennis player,  even without her coach. What made that possible? Her experience as a top 10 player with her coach.
I see the same thing happening with teams. People that have been in a self-organizing team, know how to bring their team to that higher level.
A leader that wants to create a self-organizing team must have been at least a member of such a team. BootCamp offers such an experience.
Jim & Michele left Microsoft 11 years ago to do nothing else but organizing bootcamps where they had teamwork laboratories. What they learned one week, they used the next. 
Most of us work with the same team for at least 2 or 3 years. That limits the number of teams we work with. Not so for the McCarthy�s. They worked with a few thousand people these 11 years. Based on that work they created The Core. The Core contains 11 Core Commitments and 11 Protocols. Although these protocols feel contra-intuitive, they help bringing a team to a higher level. 
When I read their book Software For your head, I loved the protocols, but I doubted if all of them could be used in real life. So I followed BootCamp in the States in 2005. I was amazed at the energy and the result oriented focus it gave me. (And I did already follow similar courses.) The only thing that comes close to leading groups is the one year VTLG. In bootcamp you also learn about results. You don�t find that back in other courses about softskills. 

Students stay the whole week in the beautifull Koningssteen, rooms are included in the price.

I am convinced that all teams that use these protocols, become 10 to 20% more productive. During a bootcamp people experience a self-organizing team, just as Kim, they will use that experience to create great results. 

That is why I asked Jim & Michele to give a bootcamp in Belgium and I will join for the second time. I am convinced I will learn a lot, even this second time. 

Read More or Order here:2007/11/04 2007/11/09

Looking for other courses?

Yves Hanoulle, Project-Coach
www.PairCoaching.net

Dear [VOORNAAM] [NAAM], [ORGANISATIE]

We hope you had a good holiday. We did.
Hereby an overview of our planned activities for 2007. 

On the 4the of September Yves & Ignace will deliver a small version of their motivation exercise to Managers4Managers Ghent. M4M is the offline netwerking event van XING.
This will give you the opportunity to try out both M4M & PairCoaching.net for free.
On top of this we offer you a one month free try of XING Premium Membership
Click here to try XING
After you have done so, you can register here for the event.


Getting Things Done in IT 
Avoid wasting time by doing less than two minute actions immediately.
Know where you go by defining desired results.
Make tasks executable by specifying next actions.
Organize the easy to forget details in life and work into a trusted system, so you can focus on what is important. Read more

Trainers: Yves Hanoulle, Bernard Vander Beken 

Date: 12 September
Place: Regus Park Atrium (Brussels -Belgium)
Price: &euro 390 /person &euro 2490 /10 persons
Book now

Retrospectives for Agile Teams
A retrospective is a meeting held at the end of a development iteration or project milestone to help the team identify ways to improve their team effectiveness. This training presents foundations of retrospective facilitation with implementation tips and practical exercises so you can try out the techniques yourself. The workshop covers how to plan a retrospective, how to run a retrospective and how to integrate retrospectives into agile development lifecycles. Read more

Trainers: Rachel Davies[UK], Emmanuel Gaillot [FR]

Date: 17 September 2007 [English]
Place: Regus Park Atrium (Brussels - Belgium)
Price: &euro 390 /person &euro 2490 /10 persons
Book now 

New: Ruby & Ruby for Rails
In this 4-day course, attendants will learn the fundamentals of the programming language Ruby as well as become familiar and make good use of the Rails MVC framework based on Ruby. Special attention is given to what makes Rails agile: - transparent development, - a framework that delivers working software early in the development cycle, - the Don't Repeat Yourself concept that facilitates responding to change and constructive collaboration with users and business - and test-first design thanks to a baked-in testing framework. Course attendants will quickly experience that the Rails framework makes these principles happen naturally and spontaneously. Read more

Trainers: Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, Hans Vandenbogaerde
Date: 29 November till 04 December
Price: &euro 1490 /person
Book now

We still have places left for the first European BootCamp delivered by Jim & Michele McCarthy.

Jim & Michele McCarthy have been leading teamwork laboratorial workshops for more than ten years. BootCamp delivers the best practices of building a team into one week. Don't hire new people, optimize your team. You can read their ideas in Software for your head, or listen to their famous PodCasts. Until now you had to travel to the States to follow their BootCamp (which Yves did). Now PairCoaching.net brings them to Europe. Read more

Trainers: Jim McCarthy [USA], Michele McCarthy [USA]

Dates: 04 November 2007 till 09 November 2007 [English]
Place: Kappele-Op-Den-Bos (Mechelen) Belgium
Price: &euro 3900/person , calls us for 10 people
Book now

You can find more workshops and dates on our website.

Receive up to 35% discount

We also offer special prices for onsite courses. 

Prices listed in Euro, 21% VAT (BTW/TVA) not included. 

Don't hesitate to contact us if you need more info.

On 17 & 18 November 2007 PairCoaching.net will be present at XPDay.net. [VOORNAAM] we hope you will be there too.

Your Sincerely,
The PairCoaching.net team

Rachel Davies [Blog]
Emmanuel Gaillot [Blog]
Ignace Hanoulle
Yves Hanoulle [Blog]
Jim McCarthy [PodCasts]
Michele Mccarthy [PodCasts]
Johan Peeters [Blog]
Vera Peeters
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe [Blog]
Hans Vandenbogaerde
Bernard Vander Beken

Dear [VOORNAAM] [NAAM], 

PairCoaching.net  kindly invites you to our last minute in agile Training.

Retrospectives for Agile teams
A retrospective is a meeting held at the end of a development iteration or project milestone to help the team identify ways to improve their team effectiveness. This training presents foundations of retrospective facilitation with implementation tips and practical exercises so you can try out the techniques yourself. The workshop covers how to plan a retrospective, how to run a retrospective and how to integrate retrospectives into agile development lifecycles. Read more 

Trainers: Rachel Davies[UK], Emmanuel Gaillot [FR]

Rachel specializes in coaching teams in agile software development. She has experience in managing teams, requirements analysis and programming in several languages. Rachel is a presenter at and organizer of industry conferences and chair of the Agile Alliance. 

Emmanuel Gaillot is a software engineer and an experienced designer for theatre and dance. He has adapted XP practices and principles to the theatrical production process, and he currently works on instilling theatre practices back into the field of software making. Emmanuel's areas of expertise and interests include self-organizing teams, software making and Extreme Programming. He is involved in the conduct of a Coder's Dojo Experiment in Paris, France, where he also works for Octo Technology as an IT consultant and XP coach.

Date: 11 June 2007  [English] 
Place: Regus Park Atrium (Brussels - Belgium)
Price: € 390
Book now 

BootCamp

Jim & Michele McCarthy have been leading teamwork laboratorial workshops for more than ten years.
BootCamp delivers the best practices of building a team into one week.
You can read their ideas in Software for your head, or listen to their PodCasts. Until now you had to travel to the States to follow their BootCamp (which Yves did). Now PairCoaching.net brings them to Europe. Read more 

Trainers: Jim McCarthy [USA], Michele McCarthy [USA]

Jim McCarthy led software development teams at Bell Labs, The Whitewater Group, and Microsoft Corporation. Since 1996, Jim has devoted himself to researching groups and how they create products and organizations. Jim uses a teamwork lab (McCarthy BootCamp, a product development simulation) and in situ research at corporations large and small, worldwide. Jim wrote “Dynamics of Software Development” in 1995, (about which Ron Jeffries, said: “Jim was extreme before extreme was cool.”) Microsoft has released the 2006 edition of Dynamics. 

Michele McCarthy, has created with Jim the Core Protocols, a collection of interpersonal protocols that support results-oriented behavior, the efficient aggregation of individual qualities into a greater whole, and the development and realization of shared visions. Together, they authored “Software for Your Head,” and host a podcast show on team and other business issues.

Dates: 04 November 2007 till 09 November 2007 [English] 
Place: Kappele-Op-Den-Bos (Mechelen) Belgium
Price: € 3900
Book now 

You can find more workshops and dates on our website.

We would like to offer you our one day workshops in a closed format at € 2.490 for 10 people. And € 99 for each extra person (maximum 20 people). If you wish, we could deliver this in 2 separate evenings. The price for one evening is €1.490 for 10 people and € 69 for each extra person (maximum 20 people). Please call Yves at +32 46 43 38 32 if you are interested in this offer.
Check our website for other dicounts.


[VOORNAAM], we hope to welcome you on one of our workshops in Belgium.

Your Sincerely,
The PairCoaching.net team

Rachel Davies [Blog]
Emmanuel Gaillot [Blog]
Ignace Hanoulle 
Yves Hanoulle [Blog]
Jim McCarthy [PodCasts]
Michele Mccarthy [PodCasts]
Johan Peeters [Blog]
Vera Peeters
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe [Blog]
Bernard Vander Beken

PS Xp.be launched the Call for Sessions for XP Day Benelux 2007.

Hello [VOORNAAM],
You know me as a technical person. Microsoft Certified trainer, developer and agile project coach.
I am convinced that most IT projects don�t fail because of technical problems but because of bad communication
Recently IT weeks published an article with the title: �Project managers need better leadership skills� [1]. I am convinced that every person working in IT should have such skills.
Since I noticed that there are no companies delivering training about the human aspects of IT projects, I created a workshop with my father in 2005. We have given this workshop many times these last 2 years, with a lot of positive feedback.
We just came back from Paris, where again we had to deny people access to our session. You can read a few reactions on my Linkedin profile [2] (�Leadership Game� and �Help my team is at war�.)
During the international events where we have given these workshops, we have met other people who developed similar workshops. Out of these meetings we created PairCoaching.net [3].
Paircoaching.net is a training company that offers pragmatic, experience aimed workshops. 2 trainers are giving these workshops, since we are convinced that this enhances the quality (in soft skills even more so than in technological trainings). All our trainers have experience in the IT-sector and are giving these workshops only a few days a month.

I would like to offer you our leadership day in a closed format at &euro 2490 for 10 people. And &euro 99 for each extra person (maximum 20 people). If you wish, we could deliver this in 2 separate evenings. The price for one evening is &euro1490 for 10 people and &euro 69 for each extra person (maximum 20 people).

Do not hesitate to contact me if you need more information.
Yours sincerely,
Yves Hanoulle, Project-Coach
Mobile: +32 476 43 38 32
Skype: YvesHanoulle 
Before printing, think about the environment

[1] http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/news/2190017/project-managers-better
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/in/yvesHanoulle
[3] http://www.paircoaching.net