Agile Coaching

Agile Coaches Gathering - Kickoff

I arrived at Bletchley Park, our historic venue for the inaugural Agile Coaches Gathering. My initial focus was to setup the space before we kick-off at 6 pm. Mike Sutton (co-organizer) helped me put up the sticky wall and open space posters. Meanwhile, Joh Hunt did her bit, as student volunteer, and helped check off names and encourage people to make name badges.

For the curious, the sticky wall that we used for the session grid is made of rip-stop nylon that can be ordered by the metre very cheaply and is then sprayed with repositionable adhesive. It's been a good investment as I've used it for Open Space at Scrum Gathering, Retrospective Facilitators Gathering, and XPDay.

We formed a circle and got the gathering started by explaining our purpose and thanking our sponsors. After a round of introductions, everyone put their thinking caps on to propose sessions. The grid quickly filled up with sessions. Liz Keogh and Joh Hunt also put cards up for on-going conversations that they'd like to have during the gathering.

Next came the challenge of dispersing our 40 strong group to local restaurants in the town of Bletchley in time for our 8pm dinner reservations. But co-ordination from Mike and me was superfluous and the magic of self-organization kicked in.

I joined the curry group and had the chance to catch up with Simon Kirk and Xavier Quesada Allue about their reviews of my Agile Coaching book. Xavier had the brilliant idea making an audio recording his review which helped capture his first-impressions of the book. I found this a very powerful way to share what he liked and his suggestions for improvement.

After dinner, some stayed up late playing Werewolf in their hotel.
While I headed north back home to Rugby, looking forward to the day ahead.

The Role of an Agile Coach at miniSPA

My Agile Coach Role simulation has been selected as one of the best sessions at SPA2009 conference and I've been invited to re-run the session at miniSPA. MiniSPA is a free taster event run by the BCS Software Practice Advancement group to encourage attendance and submissions for the SPA conference.

Hope to see you there on 15th July.

Agile Coaching Tips

I gave a talk at Skills Matter about Agile Coaching - the topic of my upcoming book with Liz Sedley.

The tips for Agile Coaches were presented as a countdown to the Number One tip with some personal stories to illustrate. Here's the full set of tips:

1. Have courage in your convictions
2. Go with the energy of the team
3. Make change as an experiment
4. Introduce the Elephant
5. Take time out to reflect
6. Ask questions to spark ideas
7. Step back to see the big picture
8. Demonstrate Respect
9. Agile is not a religion
10. Get Introduced

At the end, we had time for questions from the audience which included Dan Rough and Marta Gonzalez Ferrero.

You can see watch the video clip here:

Now I have to watch it to make sure this all gets into the Agile Coaching book!

Applying agile principles to the Agile2008 conference

This year Agile Alliance are supporting the team who are putting together Agile2008 in a brave new experiment in refactoring how we organize our Agile conference. We're actually applying agile principles to the way the conference is put together.

The Agile2007 conference was soldout  (1100 attendees) very quickly so we wanted to expand the conference to enable more people from the Agile community could attend. However, we did not want to lose the interactive nature of the conference - we want people to have the opportunity to learn agile techniques through hands-on interactive workshops which work best in small groups. Also our program is selected by experts from the agile community  in a peer review process and behind the scenes the committees have been overwhelmed by the effort required to review all the sessions. For example, last year we had 150 experience report proposals to review and whittle down to our top 50 reports. It was a similar story for other session types like tutorials.

We could have chosen to remain capped at 1100 attendees because new agile conferences are appearing to meet the demand for agile events. More agile events are being run by commercial organizations such as Agile Development Practices and Valtech Agile Days. Agile Alliance sponsors around 25 other agile conferences every year with special support for new conferences like Agile Open which are run as open space events.

Was there a way to grow the conference without compromising the quality and draining the volunteers who put the program together? I started thinking about how we could apply lean principles to the conference - I talked to Mary Poppendieck about this. I also listened to the bold ideas of Chris Matts (who recommended we go for co-located mini-conferences with community input on stories for the conference) and Elisabeth Hendrickson (who recommended we open up reviews to the agile community).

My final inspiration was Glastonbury Festival the largest greenfield music festival in the world. I've attended the festival on various years from 1983 to 2000 and seen it grow from a few fields to an amazing capacity. In 2007, over 700 acts played on over 80 stages  with about 177,000 people camping in the fields to take part. The way this is done is to create many different stages each organised around a particular style of music - this idea can be applied to our conference to create a . So Glastonbury provided the inspiration for the music festival metaphor which we have applied to Agile2008 conference this year - we are creating many "stages" within our program - each stage is designed around a topic and organized by experts (acting as stage producers) who are truly passionate about their particular areas. Each stage will have a feel of a smaller, focused mini-conference whilst providing the conference attendee with a wide choice of stages to choose from. This should help people find the sessions that match their interests as each stage will have a dedicated space where sessions related to the stage topic will be presented.

The boldest step in changing the way the conference is run is not the music festival metaphor but the way we are gathering and reviewing the session proposals for the conference. We are not doing this behind closed doors - anyone can actually create a user profile and add their own reviews and ratings on the sessions proposals. This will enable presenters to respond to review feedback and adjust their session proposals before the deadine for submissions which is February 25th. This approach has been used for XPDays in UK and Benelux for a couple of years which attract audiences of about 200 people - we hope it will also work for our much larger program.

Check out Grigori Melnik's Agile2008 call for participation message on YouTube

We hope this open process works and we encourage you to participate in it! We already have a good number of interesting session proposals in the system so please do your bit for the agile community and take a peek!

Pairing on Agile Retrospectives Workshop

I've joined forces with PairCoaching.net who specialise in coaching and training in pairs - there's a clue in the name ;-)

So I am excited to announce that I will be running my popular workshop Retrospectives for Agile Teams in September. Last time I was delighted that Diana Larsen co-facilitated the workshop with me. This time I have a new partner to work with Emmanuel Gaillot from Octo Technology who will bring to the workshop his experiences of facilitating retrospectives with agile teams in Paris. I've run the workshop in UK, Finland and Hungary and each time it evolves as the participants share their suggestions for improvement in our retrospective practicals throughout the day so hopefully this time we will have the best Agile Retrospectives workshop yet!

I think someone took a picture of Emmanuel and me at Agile2007 both wearing our PairCoaching T-shirts but I can't remember who that was - if it was you then please send me the photo!

Agile2007 -call for agile project stories

I would like to encourage people who have had an interesting story to tell about their agile project to propose an experience report for Agile2007 conference.

An experience report captures the story of a real agile project, summarizing what happened on the project and the key learning points. These reports allow practitioners to share their practical advice and guidance with other teams.

To make a proposal you need to write a two page summary of your experience which should include the following:

• Title and one-paragraph summary.
• Brief description of the project background
• Your story about what happened, focusing on the most interesting and unique aspects. This is   the meat of the proposal!
• Conclusions: what you learned, what you'd do next time, and advice for others.

Save your proposal in PDF format and then submit this using our on-line submission system by January 26th.

If your proposal is selected for inclusion in the conference then the Agile2007 review team will work with you to help you shape your proposal into a crafted experience report for publication in the Agile 2007 conference proceedings. We aim to have a final report that reads like an interesting story, explaining what happened, why you think it happened, who it happened to, and why we should care.

Please do not propose a report unless you can attend the conference which runs in Washington DC 13-17 August as you will be expected to present a summary of your experience report at the conference. The Agile Alliance who run the conference offer presenters one free registration per report to help facilitate your attendance.