Archive for October, 2009

• Developing High-Performing Teams Class at PMI San Diego

  Date: 2009.10.28 | Category: Agile, Presentations, Training | Response: 0

  Tonight I will be promoting my upcoming class on Nov 12th to the monthly meeting of PMI in San Diego.  In addition, I have five minutes to talk about what I do and talk about the upcoming class.  I am not exactly sure when I will be “on”, but networking starts at 5:30 PM and the keynote speaker begins 7:45 PM.  This should be a lot of fun!

• Sponsoring San Diego PMI Chapter Meeting on Oct 28th

  Date: 2009.10.21 | Category: Agile, Agile SD, PMI, Presentations | Response: 0

  This year, the Agile Alliance and PMI formed an Agile Community of Practice.  The community was formed because both sides recognized their is a lot of misunderstanding about each other, yet we often talk about improving the same types of things.  In the sprit of that enterprise, Look Forward Consulting decided to sponsor the October meeting of the PMI Chapter in San Diego and act as an ambassador to the project management community in San Diego.  For those of you unfamiliar with PMI San Diego, their mission (from their website) is:

  “…to serve the professional interests of chapter members by enhancing expertise through project management education, training, and PMI certification preparation; as well as, promoting association and networking within the project management community.”

  In practice, this means helping project managers make connections with other project managers, educate each other on the latest techniques and promote their ideas in their profession.  It sounds an awful lot like what we do at XP San Diego.  This should be an interesting collaboration and I am looking forward to meeting some new people.

• Developing High-Performing Teams on Nov 12th

  Date: 2009.10.18 | Category: Agile, Communication, Team, Training | Response: 0

  Does this sound like your team?

  • Boring stand-up meetings that never end.
  • You need ten people in the room to make a decision.
  • Planning meetings are just about handing out work assignments.
  • Everyone has a different reason for why the current release is important.
  • Difficulty expressing your ideas at the whiteboard or in front of the computer.
  • An upset stomach just thinking about having to work with the “difficult” person.
  • Just writing the code people tell you to write and not contributing to the design.
  • Rather be at an all-hands meeting than a code review.
  • Blind to what other teams in your company are doing.
  • Having nothing to say at retrospectives.

  If your team feels listless and like more of the same but with all these new “Agile” labels attached, then perhaps you could use a refresher of some essential interpersonal skills to improve your daily interactions with your peers and management.

  In this one-day course, we will reawaken the parts of your brain which govern communication, observation, collaboration, conflict resolution, teamwork, decision making, facilitation, critical thinking and listening.  Through the use of simulations, we will strengthen these skills, give you a chance to try out a few new ones and prepare you to become a contributing member of a collaborative, self-organizing team.  Oh, did I mention it is going to be a lot of fun?

  Sign up today!

  Your day will start off with some basic introductory exercises and explanations and then we begin the first session of the simulation, named SIMSOC.  SIMSOC (pronounced sim-sock) can be thought of as a live-action version of “The Sims” combined with the cutthroat drama of “Survivor”.  The goal of each session is to remain “alive” and further your personal goals.  Some patterns of behavior will be more successful than others and it is up to you to discover the right strategy so you remain alive by the close of the day.  At the conclusion, you will be able to identify the forces at work in the simulation, how they are relevant to the workplace, the key interpersonal skills needed for a collaborative, self-organizing team and what you can do to make your Team better.

  Your facilitator will be Carlton Nettleton, President of Look Forward Consulting (www.lookforwardconsulting.com) .  Carlton has been coaching individuals and teams on how to implement Agile principles and practices and is passionate about helping your business and team succeed. He has nearly ten years of experience working with software products and services in both a technical and business capacity from small start-ups to FDA regulated medical products.

  Sign up today!

• SoCal Code Camp – Nov 21 & Nov 22

  Date: 2009.10.16 | Category: Agile SD, Conferences, Presentations | Response: 0

  I will be presenting three sessions at the LA Code Camp this year.  Surprisingly, I am not going to be giving my Top Ten Refactoring session; I just did not feel in the mood to do it this year.  Have no fear, Llywellyn and Woody Zuill have that topic covered in their excellent Code Excellence for the Average Programmer talk and demonstration.

  The sessions I will be giving are:

  1. Experiencing Agile Through Games: we will be playing as many Agile simulations and games as we can in 75 minutes.
  2. Insights Into Scrum Illuminated by Lean: we do a lot of counter-intuitive things in Scrum, by looking at Lean we can see why they make sense.
  3. Techniques for Improving Distributed Scrum Teams: an encore presentation of my Oct 1st talk at XPSD session about my work in Shanghai this year.

• Exciting New Agile Team Training Available

  Date: 2009.10.12 | Category: Agile, Collaboration, Communication, Team, Training | Response: 0

  

  On November 12th, I will be facilitating a first of its kind training for Agile Team members.   Through the use of simulation, I will help the participants reawaken dormant skills such as how to communicate with your peers, give (and receive) feedback, conflict resolution, decision making and other key soft skills each Team member needs to function in a fast-moving Agile Team.  At the completion of this one-day course, I hope to give participants a better appreciation of what skills are needed to communicate effectively, solve problems collaboratively, identify common communication patterns (and anti-patterns) and the application in the participant’s workplace.  Also, this is going to be a lot of fun.

  In my work with Agile teams, I have observed that the greatest improvements of Team come when teaching the Team members soft skills.  These soft skills are more valuable because they allow Team members to connect with each other as individuals and foster true ownership of the work.  Too often people come to work on auto-pilot, go through the motions of their career and go home profoundly dissatisfied.  In my opinion, much of this can be traced back to a poor work environment which encourages isolation from the people we work with and the work we do.

  With the Agile community’s strong emphasis on “individuals and interactions”, you would think as a community we would have some trainings that help people improve their soft skills, yet that is not the case.   Over the past couple of years, we have seen an explosion of training provided for leaders of Agile teams – the Certified ScrumMaster program is an excellent example – or we teach Team members technical skills – the classic two-day TDD class.  These are all really good things to teach people and they are useful to know.  They form a solid foundation for technical excellence and help create and sustain the Team environment.  However, they don’t teach people how to work together as a Team.

  The simulation, named SIMSOC*, will begin the conversation of “How are we going to work together?  How are we going to make this time we spend together more valuable?”.  SIMSOC (pronounced sim-sock) can be thought of as a live-action version of “The Sims” combined with the cutthroat drama of “Survivor”.  The goal of each session is to remain “alive” and further your personal goals.  Some patterns of behavior will be more successful than others and it will be up to the participants to discover the the right strategy to remain alive by the end of the day.  No two strategies will be the same and there are no pre-planned outcomes.  Apart from a few basic “natural laws’, the participants are free to do as they choose, which creates fertile opportunities for cooperation and conflict.  By the end of the day, I hope to arm the participants with an alert mind, some valuable experiences on what types of communication and collaboration strategies which work and curiosity about the next steps they need to take to build and grow that awesome team that makes you excited to get up and go to work each day.

  * SIMSOC was created by noted sociologist Dr. William Gamson to examine the role of leadership organization, power and social change and has been in use for over 40 years in both the business and educational world.

  
  

• Agile Open NoCal – Oct 15 & Oct 16

  Date: 2009.10.08 | Category: Conferences | Response: 0

  Wanted to alert folks that I will be attending the Agile Open event being held in Fort Mason, San Francisco next week.  I attended the Agile Open SoCal event in Irvine during September and that was very fun, educational and was a great way to meet a lot of my peers in Southern California.  This event in NoCal will be a good way to network with the folks in the Bay Area.

  Just like in Irvine, the San Francisco event will be run as an Open Space.  If you have not had a chance to attend an Open Space, I highly recommend it.  They are quite interesting, exciting and empowering.  As with many gatherings of people,the most interesting parts happen during the conversations people have with each other.  Open Space is designed to get people who are passionate on a topic in the same room together to talk.  I am sure I will host a lightning talk session and a session to gather Agile games people are using these days.