Dreamfeed

Perfect Feedback

One of my favourite tools for giving and receiving feedback is the Perfection Game. It is a powerful tool to give constructive feedback in a non-threatening way. It transforms feedback from an attack or personal judgement into a constructive act of jointly improving software, articles, conference sessions, blog entries…

The fuzzy thing called lean

I’ve been asked to do some presentations and workshops around lean and software development, which gives rise to some reflections on what’s currently going on around ‘lean’ (thanks to Willem for the good conversations on this topic and for pushing me to publish this blog entry ☺)

Systems thinking with diagrams of effects

Rachel has written a nice blog entry on how to create a diagram of effects. Diagram of Effects (or causal loop diagram) is a systems thinking technique, based on the work by Jerry Weinberg and Peter Senge. I started using them about 8 years ago, to make sense of my experiences with agile software development.

Conference appearences in October

This month, I will run two workshops (together with Willem van den Ende) at the following conferences:

Working with User Story Mapping

We are using more and more user story mapping, in our courses and with clients. User Story Mapping is a relatively new agile product planning practice, with its roots in user centered design. It’s being popularized by Jeff Patton.

Agile Open Holland 2009

We’re running another Agile Open conference this year! It’s scheduled for September 10 & 11, in Baarn (right in the middle of The Netherlands).  Agile Open is a two day, full Open Space conference, interactive, peer-to-peer, intense, with lots of fun & learning.

Agile development and retrospective coherence

Last week, Jurgen Appelo agitated quite a few agilists with his blog entry The Decline and Fall of Agilists (great post by the way – keep on writing good stuff, Jurgen! . He sees more and more people preaching agile and doing agile rigidly, proclaiming for instance that you can’t do Scrum without the eXtreme Programming (XP) practices.

Advanced TDD workshop in Ghent

Together with Willem, I’ll be running a workshop about Responsibility Driven Design for the Agile Belgium User Group, in Ghent on 12 March. The objective of this workshop is to show how responsibility driven design takes object oriented thinking and test driven development a step further:

Doing It Tomorrow

Here are some of my thoughts on time management after experimenting with Do It Tomorrow (see also the overview and time management principles):

Principles of time management

In the previous entry, I wrote about the time management book Do It Tomorrow. This post is about the principles of time management that underlie Do It Tomorrow:

Mañana, mañana, …

Looking for ways to get more done with less stress, I recently bought and read Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management by Mark Forster. I’ve started experimenting with it and I like it so far. The Do It Tomorrow system is simple, but not necessarily easy (because it’s about changing your habits). It’s based on clear principles and takes a systems view – focusing on making problems in the underlying systems visible and tackling root causes instead of being just a clever trick. It suits me better than e.g. the Getting Things Done system.

Conference season

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:

No such thing as 'perfect'

Portia wrote about Perfect is Poison earlier this week:

Agile2008

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).

Courses and workshops brochure

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:

Mastering Projects

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?

eXperience Refactoring

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

Promise is Debt whitepaper published

After quite a few hours of hard work, Willem and I have finished our whitepaper on the Promise is Debt pattern (PDF, in Dutch). We frequently encounter this pattern in IT organisations: it’s a common destructive pattern of behaviour, where people overpromise to compensate for underdelivery; they fail to live up to the expectations, and then overpromise some more again…

Failure is not an option … it’s a necessity

Lots of IT projects are said to fail – many people are complaining, calling shame on the IT profession. An example is the recent article Okay to fail from the CIO Weblog, which talks about poorly run projects and underperformance.

We want you! (for Agile2008)

I’d like to invite you to propose session(s) for the Agile2008 conference (4-8 augustus 2008 in Toronto). It is the biggest international conference on agile development.

Cultural patterns summary

Here’s a summary of the six cultural patterns of software organizations we’ve been writing about the last months.

Touring around

We’ve toured around with our People vs. Process session. At XP Days Benelux we did the session in 60 minutes, which proved to be a little on the short side for the exercises and discussion the session generates. At XP Day in London we had 90 minutes, which is about the right amount of time.

Cultural patterns and knowledge creation

I’ve been thinking about the relation between the different cultural patterns of software organizations and the model of explicit and tacit knowledge that Nonaka and Takeuchi present in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company.

People versus Process on tour

Last week, Willem and I ran our People vs. Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organizations session for the first time. We received very good feedback from the people at Atos Origin, it helped us a lot in improving the session.

From Steering to Anticipating

In the current agile wave, quite a number of organizations are transitioning to Steering. A Steering culture often works quite well, but it has limitations:

Agile choreographies in the culture space

Transitioning to agile means going from a Variable or Routine culture to a Steering culture. Indicators for a Steering culture are the ideas of empirical process control, embrace change, and apply-inspect-adapt.

Noteworthy for week 43

• Ronald Doelen has written a nice blog entry about his CITCON Europe experiences
• James Shore wrote about an energized work experience; the story is an instance of the systems diagrams I published earlier this week.
• I discovered a good article on the Satir change model by Steven M. Smith.

Requirements for effective steering

To establish an effective Steering culture, you need:

CITCON Europe 2007

Last weekend, I participated in CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels. CITCON stands for Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. It is part of a worldwide series of short Open Space conferences. The session results can be found on the CITCON wiki.

Steering software development

This is the next installment in a series of blog posts on Jerry Weinberg’s cultural patterns of software development organizations.

Cultural Patterns: Routine Culture (2)

Routine – we follow our routines (except when we panic)

Agile Business Conference 2007

Last week, I attended the Agile Business Conference in London. This conference was organized by the DSDM consortium, in cooperation with the Agile Alliance. The program seemed to be aiming at the early majority (people who recently discovered agile) and not so much at seasoned agile practitioners.

Cultural Patterns: Routine Culture (1)

Routine – we follow our routines (except when we panic)

Cultural Patterns of Software Organizations

As promised, here is the first installment of a series of blog entries about cultural patterns of software organizations. Jerry Weinberg distinguishes the following patterns:

People vs. process

This week I got a notification that our proposal for an interactive presentation called People vs. Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organizations has been accepted for both XP Days Benelux (15 and 16 November) and XP Day London (19 and 20 November). I’ll run this session together with Willem.

Piecemeal Growth

I’ve decided to leave PricewaterhouseCoopers by November 1st and become a full time in(ter)dependent coach/trainer/consultant.

Through my company Piecemeal Growth, I can help you to get a better grip on your projects, to improve project cycle time, to reduce the number of defects, and to make your IT more nimble and able to cope with continuous change. I have a background in agile and lean software development, systems thinking, organizational learning, and (open space) facilitation.

Keep on failing (in the small…)

In How to Destroy your Company by Implementing Packages or Oursourcing, Hans Konstapel writes about his experiences with large, failing IT projects, in particular package and outsourcing implementations, and how lots of time, effort, and money is wasted on such projects. An excerpt:

We’re in this together

Willem has written a nice blog entry about eXtreme Customer Collaboration – about getting into the skin of the customer and operating as a whole team. We’ve had some discussions lately about the different roles in e.g. Scrum and the effect that these roles have on teams. Scrum and Extreme Programming distinguish explicit roles for the customer/product owner and developers/rest of the team. This distinction helps to think explicitly about how to fulfill certain important responsibilities in a project. The pitfall here is taking it too far, so that people start focusing on their own defined role only and state things like “that’s not my responsibility”. The team slips into an us vs. them mentality.

CITCON Europe 2007

In October, I’ll participate in the CITCON Europe 2007 conference in Brussels. It’s a 1 1/2 day Open Space conference on continuous integration and testing. It will take place on Friday 19 October (starting in the evening) and Saturday 20 October, and it’s free! It’s part of a world wide series of Open Space conferences on continuous integration and testing.

How do you know your practices work for you?

In Delivering Business Value, Tim Beck writes about (agile) practices and their relation to delivering value:

Sustainability and risk management

Recently, I discoverd Tim Beck’s Pliant Alliance blog and I’ve been enjoying his posts. In Delivering Business Value he writes about being pragmatic with agile (and other) practices – if it works and delivers business value, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop doing it and try something else. I agree and I’d like to add that it’s not only about delivering business value, but also about sustainability and risk management.Sustainability – do your practices help you to take into account not only the short term but also the long term? Will they help you to keep on delivering business value at a steady pace? Often you can get away with cutting corners for the first release. Maintainability problems will however catch up with you and it will become harder and harder to keep on delivering value.

XP Day Benelux 2006 is coming closer…

There are less than two weeks left to register for the XP Day Benelux conference. We already have almost 80 participants.Pascal has written a series of entries about this year’s program. In my opinion, the program strikes a good balance between different types of sessions, beginner and advanced, technical and people oriented, case study presentations and highly active simulations.

XP Day Benelux 2006 – call for sessions

This year we’re going to organize the XP Day Benelux conference for the fourth time. It will be held in Elewijt Center, in Mechelen (Belgium), the location of the XP Day Benelux 2004 and Agile Open conferences.XP Day Benelux provides an excellent opportunity to share experiences and learn about Extreme Programming, agile software development, and quality software development in general. The conference focuses on practical knowledge, real-world experience and active participation of everyone.

Bullshit 2.0

While reading blogs, IT newspapers and other media, I encounter a lot of nonsense about software development, software processes and software quality management. During the Presentation Zen session at the Agile Open 2006 unconference, Willem mentioned the idea of starting a presentation with a slide with just Bullshit on it, which will definitely catch the attention of the audience. I think SOA and Web 2.0 are good bullshit concepts. Last week, I read two examples:The first one was a short article in the NRC Next newspaper of Monday May 8th about Web 2.0. It is very badly written: it looks like the author heard something about Web 2.0, googled a bit, found a few words and phrases in blogs, and wrote the article without doing proper research.

Agile Open 2006

I’m back from the Agile Open conference, still processing everything and recovering a bit. It was quite intense – two days might appear quite short, but is more than enough for such an event.There were 26 participants, a nice mix of people from France, Belgium, UK, and The Netherlands. Everyone who registered, has turned up. Among the participants there were quite a number of people who had participated last year and who came this year again, because of the good experience they had at the previous one.

People vs processes – a false dichotomy?

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe writes about People problem or Process problem? – he identifies a conflict between all problems are people problems (one of Jerry Weinberg’s statements) and all problems are process problems (according to The Toyota Way). Using an evaporating cloud he concludes that every problem is a people problem AND a process problem.I have written about process before and I’d like to take it a step further: I doubt whether is the distinction between people and process is useful – I find it a false dichotomy.

Agile Open 2006

Registration for the Agile Open 2006 conference is now open. The conference will take place on 27 and 28 April 2006, in Mechelen (Belgium), in Elewijt Center. The conference fee is 145 euro (excl. VAT) if you book before April 7th.

From Fear to Fun

At the Dutch Open conference in November 2005, I met Arie de Geus, the author of the book The Living Company. He held a presentation about Innovation and Sustainability (the conference theme).Arie has worked for the Shell Strategic Planning Group. He talked about playing is learning and learning through playing, based on his experiences at Shell. He has also been influenced by people like Jean Piaget. Playing is experimenting with a representation of reality. In many disciplines, people play around with ideas, models, concepts, before taking decisions. When engineers are going to build a new oil platform for instance, they build lots of models and (computer) simulations that are thoroughly tested and stressed, until they know enough to take the right decisions and build the actual oil platform.

Balancing Act at XP Day France and SPA 2006

In March, Willem and I will be running the Balancing Act – Simple Tools for Feedback, Courage and Communication session at XP Day France (23-24 March in Paris, the first XP Day in France) and at the SPA2006 conference (26-29 March in St. Neots, UK, formerly know as the OT conference). At SPA2006, Emmanuel Gaillot will co-facilitate.The Balancing Act session is about a number of people tools based on the work of the family therapist Virginia Satir. The session is highly experiental and intensive – almost no presentation, but a lot of doing, playing, experiencing and reflecting on your experience and your feelings. The session helps you to take a step in the transition from fear to fun in interacting with others (I’ll elaborate on the fear to fun theme in a next blog entry).

Risk Analysis

Last week, I facilitated a risk analysis session for a customer. It was a very enjoyable and useful session, which has resulted in a list of important risks (with estimated probability and impact) and corresponding actions we are going to take.Good risk analysis and risk management is still uncommon on IT projects. One of the reasons is that thinking about risks is scary – people prefer to think of project success instead of all the things that could go wrong, or people are so scared of possible project failure that they avoid anything that even touches on risks, problems or failure. This can lead to the risks and the necessary mitigation and contingency actions becoming increasingly undiscussable, increasing the probability and impact of the risks, increasing the chances of project failure – the fear of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It’s no incident

In last week’s Automatiseringgids (a Dutch IT newspaper), I read an article about learning by playing (spelenderwijs leren in Dutch) as an effective tool to train people in ITIL (using a simulation of a Formula 1 race).Learning by playing is something I believe in and which I apply in workshops and courses. It was also one of the themes that emerged from the SoL Dutch Open conference we held in November 2005 – playing is learning, learning by playing – see also the description of the Fear to Fun session on the conference wiki (in Dutch).

What I’ve been up to…

It’s been quite some time since my last blog entry – I’ve been quite busy the last months:

XP Day Benelux 2005

We have decided on a program and schedule for the XP Day Benelux conference. It will take place on 17 & 18 November 2005, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The quality of the session proposals we received this year was even better than last year. There are 24 cool and interesting sessions in the program, organised by people from many different countries.Go see for yourself…

There is a silver bullet after all!

…and I’ve found it during the XP2005 conference three weeks ago, at the conference bar:

Planning paradoxes (1)

A lot of project proposals and initial project plans I see around me are based on linear models, assuming that IT projects are predictable and that we can predict a single outcome. In terms of the Cynefin model, projects are assumed to be in the Known domain. Many IT projects are however in the Knowable or Complex domain. The research oriented projects I’m involved in are usually in the Complex domain.In the Knowable domain you can use tools like risk analysis, scenario planning and set-based development as alternatives for standard linear planning. In the Complex domain, agile, feedback oriented project management approaches like rolling wave planning and working iteratively are applicable.

Process is an illusion

Recently I read two blog entries about software development processes, The “Any” process by Laurent Bossavit and About People, Tools and Processes by Mishkin Berteig.Reading these entries, I realized that processes don’t exist – they’re an illusion. A process is a (mental) model that you project on what you hear and see, to make sense of what’s happening and what people are doing.

Call for Sessions for XP Day Benelux 2005

This year, the XP Day Benelux conference will take place on 17 & 18 November 2005, in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsXP Day Benelux is a two day international conference about agile software development, intended for software development and business people from all walks of life. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and novices. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge and real-world experience.

Second Dutch Agile Seminar

On April 20th, we organized the second Dutch Agile Seminar in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. The theme was Agile Management. There were two presentations: Hans Freriks talked about the DSDM perspective on Agile Management; Erik Bos explained how working agile makes it easy to get a CMM level 2 certification with just a little additional work. Both talks generated a lot of discussion.

Back from Agile Open 2005

Last weekend we organized the Agile Open conference. I found it a wonderful experience organizing it and being there. There were about 23 participants, which was alright for a conference like this. I think we can scale it up somewhat to a maximum of 45 participants.

Systems thinking in Germany

Friday, I got notice that two systems thinking sessions have been accepted for the XP Days Germany Together with Willem van den Ende and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe I’m going to run a systems thinking workshop and together with Willem the Who has dropped the ball? Understanding Team dynamics session, which is a playful introduction to systems thinking.It’s nice to see an increasing interest in systems thinking at conferences like SPA (formerly know as OT ), XP2004 and the XP Days.

Agile Open 2005

Proudly, I’d like to announce Agile Open 2005 , the first Internatonal Open Space Conference on Agile Software Development, which will take place on 29 and 30 April in Belgium.

Aspects as a quick fix for a misfit architecture?

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is becoming more popular and seems to be moving on to the mainstream. When the AOP movement started around 1997 (building on years of research on metaprogramming and reflection), I was fairly enthousiastic about it – it seemed a very promising thing. But the last few years I’ve become more skeptical.

Agile Planning

While reading Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained 2nd Edition, I found the quote:

Back from XP Week Europe

I’m back from the European XP Days – XP Day Benelux in Mechelen (again quite succesful, we had about 100 participants), the one in Karlsruhe (Germany), and the XP Day in London.

Authority and trust

In the Extreme Programming discussion group , Brian Schuth wrote about his experience with the use of authority:

Customer Loyalty

Last week, I encountered the phrase customer loyalty at several places and I experienced a growing feeling of uneasiness with it. Johnny Moore has also written a blog entry about this.

Advice for Software Development Managers

The website of the AYE conference offers an interview with Gerald Weinberg, conducted by SDMagazine. It’s an interesting read.

Punished by rewards

I started reading Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn (thanks to Rachel for the tip!). It’s (another) very interesting and relevant book. The book discusses why the use of rewards and punishment as means of motivating people doesn’t work. It’s very readable, but it also has a thorough scientific basis. Although I’ve read about one third, I really recommend it.

Systems Thinking Resource: Mental Model Musings

I’d like to recommend the Mental Model Musings website by Gene Bellinger. This systems thinking website contains a lot of interesting stories in which systems thinking and causal loop diagramming are applied to all kinds of (organisational) situations. The website also provides clear and concise introductions to systems thinking and concepts like balancing loops, self-reinforcing feedback loops, causal loop diagramming, and simulation.

Work harder, not smarter

This Thursday, I read in the newspaper that a German candy manufacturer is letting its employees work 60 hours a week (6 days of 10 hours!) for 3 months, because otherwise the company would have to close.

Systems thinking in elementary schools

Yesterday, I found out that some elementary schools in Holland (in Limburg) are trying systems thinking in the classroom (pages are in Dutch only). Five elementary schools are running a pilot project. There are some pictures available.