Dreamfeed

It’s conference season again. If you’d like to meet up and have a chat and/or a beer, you can find me at:

CITCON Europe, 3-4 October in Amsterdam; QWAN is sponsoring this event

The Agile Holland Conference, 24 October in Amsterdam; I’m one of the organizers.

The Scandinavian Agile Conference, 28 October in Helsinki (Finland); Willem and I will run our Rightsizing Your Unit Tests workshop.

XP Days Benelux, 20 & 21 November in Veldhoven (The Netherlands); Rob and I will do our Responsibility Driven Design with Mocking presentation.

See you there!

Portia wrote about Perfect is Poison earlier this week:

Perfect doesn’t exist. Perfect is something we aspire to, it’s elusive by design.

Striving for perfection is a trap for many organisations: the organisation becomes more and more adapted to its context, ultimately fitting perfectly (having found the best practices and the optimal way of working). This also removes all variety from the system however, making it less and less adaptable. This leaves the organisation very vulnerable to changes in its context – and its context will definitely change. This a problem in many Routine cultures.

Assuming a stable environment for IT projects is dangerous: projects are in continuous flux and lots of stuff changes.  IT projects (agile or not) are complex systems (at least the ones that aspire to make a difference). A project changes its context and is changed by its context.

If you look at it in this way, there’s actually no such thing as perfect. Maybe the organisation can be perfect for a moment, fitting its context, but then the world moves on, stuff changes, and the state of perfection is over.

Maybe we should not even talk about continuous improvement, because that presupposes you’re improving towards some goal. Managing a complex system is instead a continuous balancing act – dancing with the system, while learning more and more along the way.

Picture credits: Dancing © by pedrosimoes7

I’d like to invite you to join us at the Agile2008 conference, from 4-8 August in Toronto (Canada). The program has been published recently and contains a huge amount of great sessions… warning: choosing which sessions to go to will be extremely difficult this year! Keynote presentations will be delivered by James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds), Robert C. Martin, and Alan Cooper (author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum).

The conference has adapted the metaphor of a musical festival: it is organized as a collection of stages – mini conferences around specific themes.

Together with Linda Rising, I’m responsible for the stage on agile and culture. Our stage program has three parallel tracks of tutorials, workshops, experience reports, talks, about topics like managing change and resistance, agile transition experiences, politics, ethics, story telling, jazz improvisation, and haiku-driven development.

We expect up to 1600 participants. Last year the conference sold out very quickly, so don’t wait too long to register.

Willem, Rob and I proudly present the first release of our courses and workshops brochure. We’ve bundled the descriptions of a number of existing and new courses and workshops, together with some practical information, to give you a clear overview of what we have to offer:

If you’d like to receive a paper copy of the brochure, please let me know and I’ll send you one.

Would you like to get more out of your projects? Are you juggling multiple projects at the same time? Are you an ‘accidental’ project manager, managing projects in addition to your ‘regular’ job? Are you working as a Scrum master, agile coach, or agile project manager and your projects refuse to go by the book? Are you involved in complex, cross-functional projects that you want to bring to a successful end? Or are you just interested in challenging ideas about project work?

You only get so far with tools, techniques, methodologies and frameworks, schedules and breakdown structures. The real leverage lies in the people involved. If you’d like to become more effective in getting the best from the people involved in your projects, participate in the experiential Mastering Projects workshop we’ll run on 14-16 May in Epe (in the beautiful center of The Netherlands).

Gert Heres and I are proud to announce that we will bring David Schmaltz and Amy Schwab from True North pgs Inc. over from the US to facilitate their 3 day Mastering Projects workshop. David is the author of the book The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work – How to Transform Fuzzy Responsibilities into Meaningful Results and he has served, among other things, as faculty for Jerry and Dani Weinberg’s Problem Solving Leadership Workshop.

We won’t waste your time with theories how project should work. You won’t get an official project management certification either. Instead, you will learn how to get the best from the people involved in your projects, not only from the ‘official’ project members but from the whole community around your project.

It’s a very intensive, practical, experiential workshop, where you will learn techniques and strategies that work, applying these to the project you bring in.

Mastering Projects is a 3 day residential course. Participation costs € 2075, this includes everything – course, materials, breakfast, lunches, dinner, 2 nights lodging, beautiful surroundings, and drinks at the bar

For more information see the workshop website or the brochure ^{[PDF, 178 Kb]}. Note that this is a very special, one time event with only 20 places available, so be quick to register!

I’ll be offering a new course eXperience Refactoring, together with Willem van den Ende and Rob Westgeest. We’ve been playing with the idea of designing a hands-on course for some time. With some pressure from clients, we finally decided to go for it

It is a two day course about the ins and out of refactoring software, in a responsible and cost effective way. The first public appearance will be on 4 and 5 March, 2008, near Eindhoven (The Netherlands).

In this quite unique course, you will learn how to improve the design of existing software step by step, while continuing to deliver value to your customers. It’s a very practical, hands-on course: we don’t think you will get very far by just hearing and reading about refactoring, so our approach is to let you learn by doing, practicing, and receiving feedback.

The course provides approaches and techniques to work more effectively with legacy software and to prevent new software from turning into a mess. We cover topics like code and design smells and breaking dependencies to get your tests in; we’ve also added a bit of systems thinking to help you see design debt and refactoring in an organizational context.

Check out the course page for a full description and information on how to join – don’t wait too long: we only have a limited amount of places.

Picture credits: Look what I have done! © by Elsie esq.