Agile Coach Camp 2010 is coming the weekend of March 19, 2010 in North Carolina.    I’ve heard great things about Coach Camp and this is my first opportunity to attend.  You can check out their site here and for those who aren’t familiar with Coach Camp, it’s an Open Space conference focused on peer-to-peer learning and exploration as opposed to the traditional speaker/audience conferences I’m not a huge fan of.

Anywho, onto the position paper:  You’ll notice these are high-level points, that’s the point of Coach Camp.  The goal is to share experience and gain feedback from the Agile community.

Title: A Recipe for Enterprise Agile Transformation

Background and Challenges:

• large department within large organization
• tall hierarchy, great deal of office politics
• heavily silo’d organization
• complex product portfolio
• mix of full time, contractors, outsourced developers and teams
• limited people with Agile experience in the organization
• no recognized Agile champion

Speaking and Presentation topics I plan to share:

• transitioning focus of functional managers and other roles
  • there is much confusion about ‘where does my role fit’?
• breaking down silos between multiple groups
  • having to prove you are worthy of being trusted
  • demonstrating and sharing success and failures
• portfolio and team organization
  • how to structure your teams with the right skills for the project
• techniques for handling ’specialist’ groups
  • how these groups interface with teams
  • how these groups share information gained from working with multiple teams
• cross-project knowledge sharing (technical or process related)
  • getting people together to talk about experiences.
• How PMO and process teams evolve
  • more teaching and coach, less command and control
• spreading Agile culture
  • making it about the organization, not the coaches
  • teaching the organization to think for themselves

The above topics will be accompanied by some fancy diagrams I’m working on for an experience paper and due to the format of Coach Camp, if my paper is accepted and put into the plan, the topics discussed with likely be determined by what my peers want to hear about.

I am still planning on writing and experience paper I had hoped to have finished by now where I can share more details.  Interested in your thoughts and experiences!

Wow.   Seriously, wow.

I’ve been staring at this one line post for about 10 minutes wondering how to better explain my euphoric state right now and “wow” seemed like the right word to start with.

Much like other folks who came here, I had heard great things about AYE and the notion was always that if you can only make one conference, make it to AYE.

First I’ll start with day 2 since I was far too mentally exhausted yesterday to post. Well, maybe the swim, hot-tub and beer had something to do with that exhaustion.

After Day 1 I realized I had discovered what I wanted to take away from this conference so I attended the more tactical sessions from Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby.  Johanna’s session was about portfolio management and Esther’s was about a manager’s role in self-organizing teams.  Both of these sessions hit home for me and I gained some valuable tools that I know will help given my current environment.

Johanna’s started with a brief introductory chat followed by a simulation with a twist that produces a great “AHA!” moment for me.  I felt I participated much more in this session and it helped me gain more confidence in how I can apply this learning in my day to day work life.

Esther’s session was fantastic.  Folks broke out into groups and talked about advantages and disadvantages of self-directed vs management directed teams from the manager’s and team’s perspective.  The groups then compared notes and the lesson I learned is that there needs to be a balance between what the manager’s do and what the team does.  The more a manager does for the team, the less things the team will do for themselves.  The key is to identify what activities the team can contribute with and how manager’s can foster and nurture that learning.  This topic is particularly interesting given my current work environment so I was pleased I chose this session.

Today started off with Steve Smith’s session on how to sell an idea to management.  The class broke into 4 groups and each group had a “Star”, manager, coach and observer.  The goal was to take a real life scenario for the “star” and play out a scenario where the star wants to ask the manager for something.  I was the observer for one group and after each interaction between the manager and star, the whole class would debrief on observations and feedback from the observer, manager and star.

After round 1 the coach would help the star improve and we’d repeat the exercise by either simulating a second meeting or starting over.  This was my favourite session of the conference and Steve provided very valuable insights for how to effectively communicate with a manager when you are asking for something.  Gil Broza also provided some insights on human behaviour that provided more value to everyone.  All in all because there were 4 groups, and therefore 4 simulations, there was a wealth of knowledge shared and I learned the most from this session.

Today finished off with Don Gray’s session on a personal retrospective which helped me digest the knowledge presented to me over the last 3 days and it was very low-key and quiet.  I had a brief chat with Don afterwards and talked about my experience at AYE and he provided more insights that gave me a great deal to think about (and a free book!) to take back with me.

Since I finished early I wanted to see if there were open slots for Johanna’s or Esther’s 1-on-1 sessions.  I felt terrible for interrupting  them both to ask how I could sign up but Esther was gracious enough to find me when her other session was done.

I was initially speechless.  I’ve read her Retrospectives book and blog posts so I will admit it was quite intimidating at first but I do realize it was all due to my insecurity.   I explained my conference experience and asked some specific questions about challenges I’m facing and she was more than happy to answer those questions and provide me with some ideas that would help.

The single greatest piece of advice was about an approach to take when I get back.  Ask the team about their week, don’t make my returning to work after a week off about me.  Absolutely share information when they ask but make sure that the organization and team know it’s about them, not me.   Once I’m presented with a situation that requires it, I have a new set of tools to help them with their problems.

To wrap up the conference all I could muster was wow.  I have never experienced a social interaction such as this before.  I would absolutely like to thank Jerry Weinberg, Steve Smith, Don Gray, Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman for their dedication not only to improvement of the Agile community but simply for being wonderful people.  Their willingness to dedicate time between sessions, after sessions, at lunch, dinner and being so approachable was truly inspiring and I am grateful for the new set of tools and knowledge they all shared.

When is registration open for AYE 2010?

The sessions being presented at AYE seemed much more relavent to me at this point in my life and career.  I also felt these experiences would help me meet some great people, share some ideas and help with me with challenges I’m experiencing at my current company.  Of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s sunny, 30 degrees and the resort is just fantastic!

The toughest part about day 1 was actually selecting which sessions to go to.   As I mentioned, I didn’t really know what to expect so my choices today were based on exploring and trying to figure out what I really wanted to get out of this conference.

Morning Session: Managing Change: Knowing When, Knowing How (Steve Smith)

We started off with everyone doing a quick introduction and each person also answered how they felt about change.  Personally, I love change.  It’s challenging, exciting and it gives me the opportunity to help make something better.  I also enjoy helping people cope with change, in the context of adopting Agile,  so I was particularly interested in Satir’s Model.

Steve gave us an article on Satir’s Model and then we started an exercise that would take our “star” ( which was a randomly chosen attendee) through the model.  The attendees were split into 4 groups and each group assumed either Status Quo/Resistance, Foreign Element, Chaos, New Status Quo.

Each group had an objective and I’ll paraphrase, but if you’re not familiar with Satir’s model, I’d recommend reading this.

Status Quo: keep the “star”  in his comfort zone and resist change

Foreign Element: an insertion of some element that causes disruption, something that tried to pull the star out of status quo

Chaos: create chaos for the star

New Status Quo: inject an idea and create and complete the change

This exercise was extremely creative and each group came up with fantastic ideas.  I was in the status quo group and we built a physical wall out of chairs, people and tablecloths to keep the foreign element out and tried to create a soothing atmosphere for our star because based on our interview, we felt it would keep him with us.

Our plan failed miserably!  The Foreign Element group was extremely disruptive and there was actually some pushing and shoving at some point and the Chaos team actually mentioned that the Foreign Element group created all the chaos so there wasn’t much for them to do.

It’s difficult to describe the entire exercise, it was something you would need to experience to truly understand what we went through.

While the exercise might have been chaotic and, at times, frustrating, the message I interpreted was loud and clear:

Try as you may, change cannot be controlled.

There are certain ways of helping and coaching people at various stages of Satir’s model but by and large, change will happen and you probably do not know where the end result is or how to get to there.  I was able to tie this into much of the training classes I deliver where people just want the answer.   Sorry, there is no user manual for implementing Agile.  It will be disruptive, it will be chaotic, we probably won’t know exactly how we are going to get to the end goal but we do have the tools and knowledge to help us work together towards the solution.  The key is motivation and the desire to change.  I cannot help you if you don’t want to accept my help.

Afternoon Session – Saying No That Really Means No

This one was a session I really wanted to attend.  After experiencing this session I was satisfied to learn that I already knew this.  I seem to be asked similar questions we talked about in the session during my training classes.  The most frequent comment seems to be “we just don’t say no around here“.  My reply is usually along the lines of  “so how’s that working out for you?”

It’s pretty simple, if you can’t say no when you mean no, your yes is meaningless.  There is always an alternative so look for the solution and it’s never as simple as yes or no.  Regardless of the “we have no choice” mantra that seems to plague most companies I’ve worked with, there is always a choice it’s just a matter of figuring out the solution.  There’s not much else to comment about on this session other than Jerry Weinberg is simply brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to his stories.

Event BOF (Birds of a Feather) Session: Re-inventing Yourself

This was an extra, optional session hosted by Johanna Rothman.  There was no description but the title was enough to get me to sign up along with 30 other folks.

Our goal was to create a career timeline and try and identify our own patterns so we could re-invent ourselves and prevent us from repeating those patterns.  Simple enough, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.

I’ll save the details of my pattern for a later post, but the next step was to pair up with someone and talk about your patterns and answer a few questions to come to some type of realization.   This helped me a great deal and I immediately connected with what Johanna was saying.  She did give us homework of writing out what 1 day of a perfect job would be like and then offered a follow-up session where we will come up with an action plan to get there.

Summing it Up

Sorry for the long post, provided you’re still reading of course, but this was a great first day.   It was an eye-opening experience and coming in I knew there was a great deal that I don’t know but after today I realized I knew more than I though I did.  Today’s sessions re-assured me and also helped set my focus for the rest of the conference.

More Details

http://www.sqe.com/Agiledevpractices/