These PositionPapers have been submitted by those registered for this event.
When you read about who's coming and what they are passionate about, prepare to be surprised!
The Questions are:
- What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
- What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
- How do you plan to contribute?
Hint: upload, then insert your picture using link on right hand side.
Angelika Drach
I am a freelance Scrum Coach with a background in project management.
When I first learned about „Agile“, I had been working with teams in different industries for many years. I remember how exhilarated I was, that my intuitive approach to advance projects evolutionary finally had a name. Since 2007 I use and coach Scrum to foster self-organization in IT project teams.
I want to learn about experiences with “Agile Testing” and can contribute on “Leadership and Self-Organization” based on the principles of Harrison Owen.
Deborah Hartmann Preuss: coach with a mission, "bringing joy back to the workplace"
In 2001 I joined a team that threw out RUP and used Scrum to save a project stuck in analysis paralysis. There I discovered that even with working software and a healthy team, if bridges have not been built to the rest of the organization everything is at risk. Since then I have been helping teams both to adopt Agile, and to create a better ecosystem for collaboration within their organisations. I have been an independent Agile coach and trainer since 2005. I am also a trained personal and team coach, having completed programs with The Coaches Training Institute and Newfield Network coaching program. I live in Karlsruhe.
I want to explore teaching games, coaching coaches, feedback loops outside the team. I can contribute on "making and keeping promises," "powerful questions", and by sharing my experiences.
Pierluigi Pugliese
I'm in software development since I don't remember really when and I still have in my mind those sad waterfall times. Agile changed my way of working and the way I am dealing with teams and processes, and coaching is a big part of what I do now. This camp is a wonderful opportunity to learn how other colleagues work, compare and together improve our skills in this area and explore the boundaries of agile coaching and push them to uncharted territories. For this conference I am hoping for an open discussion and I am willing to involve myself to create the "team spirit" an event like this should have. It started already: I believe so much in this event that I teamed up with a great group of organisers to set it up and I will put the same positive energy during the camp! See you there, let's meet for some great wavemaking!
Christiane Philipps
I've been working as IT and Quality Assurance Manager with a strong focus on Agile. With over 10 years of experience in online business, I have been working as a freelance consultant and interim manager. I came in contact with Agile and eXtreme Programming three years ago, while I was working as a freelance programmer, wondering why some projects failed and others didn't - though they had been quite similar in the beginning. Principles and values in XP were the answer to my questions. In march 2009, I was part of a team of 60 members who transitioned to Scrum. My challenge was making a team of agile testers out of the QA department. Since January I’ve been working as Chief Product Officer (CPO) at DailyDeal.de, a social live shopping platform, where I've been introducing Scrum. One of my main interests is thinking, reading, writing and talking about Agile Leadership, Agile Consciousness and building up agile teams. Those who know me personally can tell you: I like wavemaking. And I like nearly everything which has to do with radical change… So, that’s what I can contribute to the community. What I hope to learn there is: To do it gently – well, that hasn’t been one of my strengths so far. An aspect of change I'm particularly interested in is the middle-management's fear of change because they're afraid of losing their power - and what the perspective might be we could offer them.
Josef Scherer
I have been freelance Scrum Coach for almost 3 years now. About the same time I started to learn and practice Solution Focused coaching and consulting.
For more information on me visit https://www.xing.com/profile/Josef_Scherer
I plan to explore the connections between the pratices and principles of Agile and Solution Focused Coaching.
I'd like to do some live coaching sessions and a workshop on some major principles of Solution Focused coaching.
Marc Bless
I started developing software some 22 years ago (good old C=64 times for those who still remember). So I had to became a computer scientist in the 1990s, of course. In the last 12 years of my professional career I've seen many projects struggling for several reasons: lost individuals, failing interactions, fear-driven management, traditional waterfalls, destructive leadership, missing responsibility, and many more. There had to be some other way to get software projects succeeding! Some years ago I read Beck, DeMarco, Schwaber, Cockburn, and realized the real values of this game--I finally could start to change the world.
Agile experience: coaching Scrum, Scrumban, and agile practices in general to teams; implementing Scrum in regulated organizational environments; transition to Scrum in distributed environments
Plan to learn/explore at this conference: I'd like to explore how to coach a coach, and how to improve my general coaching skills. I'd be interested in how other coaches deal with "difficult" people in a team.
Contribution: Everything I know, everything I think, everything I experienced, everything I theorize.
Andreas Leidig
What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I slid into this whole agile issue by taking a Scrum Master course with Ken Schwaber in 2004. During this course I discovered that many of the other participants perceived the ideas behind scrum as being extraordinary. For me, on the other hand, these ideas closely matched my previous actions and experiences at work that had taken place without me and my teams knowing anything about Agile. The first opportunities to work in the area of Scrum coaching were offered to me only a few years later. During this work, I noticed that it is very important to take care of the product, and that there the pain is much stronger and the teams need support more badly than for the process. During the last few months, I coined the term "agile architect" for this role, and I'm doing my work with this role metaphor in mind.
What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? There are competing interests between the product and the process. I am interested in how other coaches deal with this situation.
How do you plan to contribute? I would like to discuss whether agile is an end in itself or whether there are alternatives to agile processes that are still humane. In this discussion, I can share concrete experiences from my current work in non-agile environments. I am also interested in further shaping the role of "agile architect", especially regarding the balance between contents and process. There is another issue regarding large non-agile organizations. Sometimes I am hired as technical consultant. Soon I realize that in order to be successful with this job the company needs to become more agile. How can I establish this when the company officially does not want to become agile? On how many of the organization's rules do I need to cooperate in order to be able to change them? When is a point where the rules start to change me instead, so that I cannot initiate change for the company any more?
Nicole Rauch
What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? If you ask me about my experience being an official, paid coach of a software development team, then I must say that I have none. But I get lots of opportunities to coach my children, my partner, my coworkers and, most of all, myself :-)
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference? I am planning to become a coach in the next few years, so I want to meet interesting people, and I want to learn a lot about coaching, e.g. by watching coaches, talking to them and listening to their stories.
I also want to learn from Open Space in general, I want to experience the peace and calmness that occurs when I let happen what happens, and I want to learn to be a butterfly.
Finally, the conference topic is very much aligned with my current focus: change and the challenges, opportunities and disappointments that are related to it.
How do you plan to contribute? I am very interested in change and coping with change. So my contribution would directly be related to this issue, e.g.
- how to overcome the resistance towards change
- how to motivate people to allow change to happen
- how to motivate people to look forward to change and to engage in change
Sometimes I try to initiate change, only to discover that this change is not really welcomed or accepted. So it is like offering "change as a service" that nobody actually wants. I wonder how I can improve this, and how I can make this change more pleasant to everybody.
Sebastian Eichner
I've been working with two agile teams for the last few years as developer and trainer/facilitator. Personally i'm using agile techniques since around 2000.
Currently i'm especially interested in lean and systems thinking.
I hope to learn more about supporting change, learning as a coach and responsible applying of agile methods.
Web: https://www.xing.com/profile/Sebastian_Eichner Twitter: www.twitter.com/stdout
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Martin Heider
I’m working for more than 17 years in the IT business. As freelancer I supported my clients in several roles, e.g. as developer, architect, test and integration manager, team and development lead, mentor and coach. My experience covers international, distributed projects and teams of different sizes. Since 2005 I’m working more and more as mentor and coach for teams and projects. In this role I help them to adapt agile values, principles and practices. Moreover I’m involved in different community activities as organizing this agile coach camp, member of the advisory board of XP Days Germany, Track Chair of JAX Agile Day and moderator of Agile Monday in Nuremberg.
I want to learn practices how to improve and reflect in my role as an agile coach? What can be my acceptance tests? How do I measure my personal development? What are my indicators for being totally wrong, what should be my “stop the line” signals? How do I keep the balance between pragmatism and dogmatism? How do I know that I’m the right person for the customer and vice versa? Furthermore I hope to learn a lot of new practices, simulations and games. I’m looking forward to meet other agile coaches who kick me out of my "Shu" box and provide me new insights. Last but not least I’m really excited to see all the agile companions inspired by similar values, principles and practices, sharing their stories and experiences.
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Ilja Preuß
I'm a guerilla Agile change agent, mentor and facilitator at a small software development company for almost a decade now. Questions that are on my mind include: how far does self-organization go? What if it wasn't only the development team that self-organized? And where is the border between helping a team become more effective and inhibiting its self-organization? I can contribute my experience from trying to introduce Agile practices where Agile isn't officially backed by management, and from trying to move Open Space Technology from being a one time event to being a self-organized meeting format used in day to day operations.
John McFayden
What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? Late last year I certified as a ScrumMaster, and it was during this course that I noticed a lot of similarity between what the trainers were doing with how I worked with colleagues. This lead me to explore the idea of coaching as a career and I was lucky enough to move to a team, shortly after this, who asked me to coach/mentor them in the process side of Agile. The last 4 months has been a real eye-opener for me, working in a resistant organisation with an enthusiastic team.
What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? I hope to learn from other coaches experiences, particularly any common challenges and the lessons others have learned to avoid/resolve these. Aside from the learning experience I hope to meet some like-minded people and have a beer or two.
How do you plan to contribute? As a new coach I have a lot of enthusiasm, curiosity and questions which I hope will be of interest to more than myself. A couple of thngs I'd like to talk about/workshop are the introduction of Agile to an organisation and how to improve a team's collaboration.
Johannes Link
I've been trying Agile development and coaching Agile teams for a decade now. Coming from a strong XP background, I strongly favor a combined technical / communicational approach over the pure "try to get your team self-managed" one.
One thing that really bothers me is how to define criteria for a successful coaching gig. Is it enough if I get positive feedback afterwards? Is it enough if the team is better off afterwards than before? Is it enough if my client's customers are more content with the product they receive? Another topic I'd like to tackle during the camp is finding out if coaching teams and organisations is really the career path I should follow. Maybe others wonder about that as well?
During the exchange with the other coaches I'd like to hear how others define their own success criteria and how they cope with not living up to them. I plan to share all my experiences and war stories about techniques, failures and coaching epiphanies I've gone through.
Sven Tiffe
Four years ago somebody told me about Scrum and I was pretty puzzled about the idea not to design the entire product first and then start coding it. I was pretty concerned that the idea behind Scrum may get abused by people who would rather like to stay in their comfort zones. However, I started to implement Scrum in my team and in the beginning we had no real idea what we've been doing; we did not follow best practices, we simply started by defining sprint cycles, writing down sprint goals and checking what we have reached after four weeks.
Two years ago I was able to introduce a dedicated Scrum master who took up his role serious and with whom we implemented Scrum starting from the true doctrine and stepwise tailoring it to our needs. As product owner, I felt surprisingly pressure increasing to deliver "ready" requirements to feed a team which was always hungry for new requirements. As manager, I had the opportunity to observe the raising issues of lost power, shifted responsibilities, depricated roles but also new motivation, higher efficiency, better quality positioning of the team during this transition phase. And when we reached, as we thought, a pretty good level, we experienced real coaching and learned that good teams still have endless opportunities to improve. Nowdays I am involved in an agile transition of our R organization and I expect that those patterns and antipatterns I have observed in our small habitat will more and more expose root problems on larger scale in the way how people organize their work.
In the end, I believe that introducing Scrum to an organization with improvement opportunities is not even about introducing "Scrum" at first. It is not about the terms being used, it is not about having a heartbeat, it is not about the manifesto. It touches on radical, basic requirements of working as a team (and not only _in_ a team), on getting homework done first, on open minding and dedication to quality. Though all of this may also be reached by other methodologies, I believe that Scrum is a very honest way of planning by formalizing gut feeling, a very disciplined way of working and finally a potential fun way to work which leaves room for improvement to everyone involved.
I am looking forward to share with you my excitement of Scrum but also my concerns of Scrum as I still believe that it includes risks of being abused by being interpreted with selective perception. I hope to learn from other attendees more about the real world of implementing Scrum which is not always described in books and courses. Topics I would like to attend and/or host are:
- Team leads: lost role in Scrum
- Feeding hungry teams: how to start a Scrum project with a blank backlog?
- Scrum in distributed organizations (teams across sites): is shared leadership possible at all, if one person owns the mouse?
- Scrum on the backbone: How will Scrum be affected, if the system is the actor?
- Scrum and Change Management
- Scrum in Comics: What Would Dilbert Say?
Jens Korte
3+ years experience of coaching teams
Want to know the must have coaching skills. Want to practice coaching exercises.
Want to contribute my experiences (I'm thinking about details until camp)
Bernd Schiffer
What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I've been doing Agile since 2001. I started with TDD, learned to be an XP-Coach, was then certified as a Scrum Master, and I work as a Scrum Coach most of my time these days. My employer is it-agile GmbH.
What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? I want to be kicked out of my comfort zone by challenging thought from others. I want to learn from other's experience. I want to explore new Agile people. That's the main reason I want to attend.
How do you plan to contribute? I'm able to collaborate with or to compete against other's, depending upon the subject, with fresh thoughts or challenging questions.
More infos at Twitter, Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Blog.
Kai Beck
Oh my God, I'm glad that reasonable project management has finally been named and came to light. Before the widespread use of Scrum and agility as a fixed term, common sense was almost missing in project management. Young companys with only a few employees are working agile anyhow - without knowing it or even calling it agile. Right? Not necessarily! The corporate culture is significantly influenced by the top management. Most managers try to copy and paste structures they found in the big enterprises they came from. To convince people to get agile can be a tough job. How to succeed in it is what I want to talk with you about.
Web: gettingAgile.de, Blog: beckdoor.de, Twitter: lastnick
Christoph Stock
1) What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
Writing software since 26 years (I hate to say that ;) I choose to be around in the software developing industry after finishing my studies in Astrophysics (numerical thesis). Openly said I was shocked doing "professional software development". As a component tester I tested functionality that was not longer required, as a developer I followed a long outdated plan and as an analyst I need to work with unmotivated stakeholders that did not understand their business. With the new century I joined my first "real software project" where I get in contact with XP and iterations. Since 2007 I'm a CSM and CSPO and immediatelly tried to apply this new knowledge to all my clients and my projects. Only a few accepted this change but all of those clients are doing great software development since then. Coaching came as a natural consequence and I'm happy to complete already three coaching jobs. I hope there will be more chances to coach in the future.
2) What do you plan to learn/explore at this conference?
I'm actually working for large IT organizations and it seems very complicated to bring them into the agile path. It seems to be a mixture from a wrong understanding of all none waterfall processes and a complete unagile way to set up their workbenches and outtasking contracts. Often large IT organizations even resist in seeing themselves as IT organizations. I'm also interested in learning more example where agile aproches work out outside the software industry. Apart from that I want to meet friends and maybe run a mile or so ;)
3) How do you plan to contribute?
I recently introduced scrum into a scaled environment and I would be more than happy to contribute a session about magic estimation and/or SoS (Scrum of Scrums). Additionally TNG takes the honor to put itself on the list of sponsors for this event. Looking forward to see you all.
Xing Twitter Blog
Simon Roberts
1) What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I've been coaching agile teams since 2002 in the UK and Germany - initially as "guerilla agile" in government and telecoms organisations, where I was hired as a PM and later on as someone hired to help organisations transition to agile. I now teach and coach Scrum and agile engineering practices. I enjoy working directly with engineering teams and with management. I'm a founder of ScrumCenter GmbH.
2) What do you plan to learn/explore at this conference?
I'm hoping to learn more about:
- Techniques for helping people to change.
- Interventions that coaches can make without breaking self-organisation.
- I'm interested in the potential of clean language, metaphor and symbolic modeling as coaching tools (ever since seeing an inspiring video that showed Penny Tompkins using clean language to help a software development team member solve his own problem). I would love to hear from anyone else who is interested in this area.
3) How do you plan to contribute?
I plan to contribute by sharing my experiences helping teams and large, medium and small organisations to make the transition to agile.
Stefan Huber
Leading software development teams for some years, I always tried to put the pressure out of it, relying more on learning and doing the right thing together than letting the heroes work overtime. This also means kinda coaching the teams and this experience I would like to share.
I am working in a project driven consulting environment on the way to support long term product development. So I am glad, we now think more in terms of agile software development and chose to introduce Scrum. With a strong interest in agile practices and methodology for a long time I am starting to work as a Scrum Master soon. And in a longer perspective I would love to work as a Scrum Coach.
Thus I am expecting from Agile Coach Camp many different views on how to introduce Scrum and managing and supporting this change to the good of all stake holders. I would love to talk about the experiences and the mindset of the other participants, especially the ones one or many steps ahead on the road i am travelling. And also what tools and eduction could help me further on.
Twitter: sthuber
YvesHanoulle
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I'm using agile idea's to raise my kids. What I learn from my kids I use to coach team's.(and vice versa)
I plan to use my two ears more then my one mouth. [As I talk around the world about agile, you can imagine this will
be hard for me. ]
- Ask tough questions and let other people do the talking.
- I'm interested in having a discussion about Pair Coaching as a technique/way of working
- I'm interested in discussing how my website www.paircoaching.net could be used by other coaches
- I'm passionate about the CoreProtocols
- Discuss how Scrum and GTD could be combined
- Discuss the advantage or disadvantage of "venting" in a retrospective
- Since the 1 January 2010 I'm asking an Agile Retroflection Of the Day I'm looking for feedback, questions, answers etc...
- You can find my blog on www.hanoulle.be
- You can find me on Social media as YvesHanoulle
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Pierre Neis , PMO / Scrum Coach
http://www.linkedin.com/in/pierreneis
Skype: pierre.neis
Blog : managingagile.blogspot.com
Twitter: elpedromajor
Sydney A. Friedman says :
"...You can reach everything in your life if you have the courage to dream it, the intelligence to make a realistic project and the will to see it concluded..."
I act essentially as a Organizational Advisor and Coach in Global Companies. Help them getting more agile and at last less waterfoolish.
As a coach, I stay beside my customers and help them building bridges between their people in a System Thinking Way.
My tags: Scrum, Agile PMO, Agile Governance, Agile Portfoliomanagement, APLN, Lean (Thinking, Management, Manufacturing, Development), L6S, PMBok, Prince2, Program Management, System Thinking, Process Communication, Cynefin...
Left brain activities: try to find myself since years and years.... best experience Amma's Darshan (twice)... but it's my stuff ;b))
Christine Neidhardt
My main work is coaching teams and companies to discouver their talents, effectiveness and creativity. I'm working with different methods and crossing them in order to get the best results. I use TA, innergame, agile methods, ZEN, systemic communication working mainly with companies heading versus sustainability in a holistic understanding. 2. I would like to learn as much new methods and share and interact in order to get best results in teams. I would prefere to experiment instead of talking too much. I would be open to work in projects together. 3. I would love to share some of my working tools with the agile coaches and leading a workshop or bringing the method in, if suitable.
Eike Reinel
1. Since 1993 I've been working as a software developer, tester, analyst, architect, software and IT security consultant, sales director, project manager, company co-founder, managing director, Scrum Master and Scrum Coach. Since we founded TNG Technology Consulting GmbH in 2001, we started developing software with agile methods. In 2007 we recognized there was a name for the way of doing agile development nearly the way we did it: SCRUM :) Since 2007 we have sent all of our consultants (and even our management assistent :) to Scrum Master Certifications. Personally I used agile methods in a project for a telco company over several years since approx. 2003. After that project (since 2007), I introduced Scrum in a project for an international insurance company (at first "under the radar"). After the successful lauch of release 1, we got the official permission to use Scrum for the rest of the project. In 2009 I started working as a Scrum coach for a new Scrum team of a customer.
2. Currently I focus on group-dynamic effects, solving conflicts within the team and team building and I hope to learn many things about this.
3. I'd like to share my thoughts, insights and experiences of my last projects in the sessions. One possible session I could host would be a session about solving communication problems between team members and solving motivation issues.
Klaus Schenck
• What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
Well, I’m a “recovering manager” (medical device innovation R&D), and an experienced coach, but a newbie to Agile. The closest I got to it so far was reading about it (excerpts from Alistair Cockburn), listening to some presentations introducing the principles of SCRUM, and watching a SCRUM-coach (Josef Scherer) at work for two days. And from talking with him, my understanding was that my own way of “solution focused” coaching and Agile may have quite some aspects in common.
• What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference?
Further explore what Agile may have in common, and what beyond, those possibly related coaching tools in my toolbox, like “Solution Focus (SF)”, “FlowTeam”, “Critical Chain Project Management” or the “T5-Agreement”. As I’ll have a workshop at an upcoming SF-conference about “narrations from the neighbors”, about approaches to effective coaching related to SF, I’d love to find Agile is one more such neighbor to tell others about.
• How do you plan to contribute?
Participate actively, share knowledge about maybe related methods and tools (if anybody cares to listen …), share jokes (if I can recall any …) and laughter (if others can recall any jokes), and “network”. (Recently I had to teach a class on “complex adaptive systems”, and one major learning for myself was that something called “autocatalytic networks”, i.e. networks of mutually supportive agents, or persons, have a significant evolutionary advantage over competitive attitudes, so the former is what I love to support. ;-)
Krishan Mathis
1. Scrum teams tend to have a hard time without a culture of excellence
2. How can I contribute to create a culture of trust
3. Iterating a company towards agile: the real meaning of PDCA and double loop learning
Stefan G. Gfrörer
In 2006 I had to manage a “hara-kiri project”: short deadlines, no (detailed) requirements, a totally new team and so on. I knew the only chance is: Change how to work! That was my start into agile. And despite of “hara-kiri project”: I still live. :-)
Since this time I got also a developers and a management view on agile. I am convinced of agile, but nevertheless I did my PMP certification in 2008 to see “the other side”. While looking on the far side, I saw that’s not the other side. That’s what I want to contribute to the agile community (and the PMI community too).
My special interest today is the organizational aspect of Agile.
Following the discussion in the agile community and on (agile) IT-conferences I think that most of the questions how to introduce agile practices in a developer environment are solved. Or with other words: we still discuss every time nearly the same questions, because you find nearly the same problems (o.k - it's important too...).
Nevertheless it’s easy to convince developers to work with agile methods. Normally they get the advantage of agile software development and after some time they love it.
On the other hand IMHO one topic is not so easy at handle: the organizational change to Agile.
Never mind whether we look at an IT service organization or an IT department of a company: It’s not enough to change the developers to agile. You have to change the organization too and that’s more difficult.
What to I mean with ‚change the organization‘?
Three aspects are important:
1. The project view: A software development project is more than transferring requirements into code. Most likely there is a change project in the company, there are other things to do (and to manage, to steer, to control…) We should do this the agile way too.
Do we have recipes to involve the stakeholders outside the small SW project and bring them to agile?
2. The management view; Years over years they bought software like a car (and they still do it). Management often thinks in categories of budgets, costs, ROI, time to market, ‚resources‘ (and they mean people), predictability, WBS and so on. Some of this we can address with the agile approach. But management have to change their mind too. If they expect the same answers (like in the old world), they will be disappointed and it will be difficult to convince them (on the long run).
3. The organizational view: Most organizations are divided in departments of business, IT-governance (with business-analysts and the steering tasks of IT) and at the low end(!) the developers (you can outsource it, it’s not so important). But that’s not agile. You have to change the organization of the departments too. And some people will lose power.
I think we have to address the organizational aspects. That’s the challenge for the next years, because a lot of companies change to agile, the expectations are very high, but the companies aren’t mature to go to agile. We should assist them and develop practices to help the (upper) management to become agile.
Uwe Schmitz
1. What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I am infected with Scrum since January 2005 by a CSM course by Ken Schwaber. Since then I work as a Scrum Master and Coach helping others to apply Scrum. I am involved in (small) pilot projects and (larger) agile transitions. My role is to help others during the tough daily business to get most out of being agile - not just applying a Scrum book. One of my most significant experiences for successful projects is, that as many persons are in the project as many different characters you have to deal with. Of cause this is not new, but something always to remind.
2. What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? Something you never ever have enough of: dealing with hundreds of different kind of people in real project situations
3. How do you plan to contribute? I offer to host a session: Surviving Death March projects with the help of Scrum =====================================================
Situation: Deadline is(!!) fixed (and quite tough)! Minimum marketable feature set is(!!) fixed (and quite tough)! We somehow think, we will not make it! Either there is no budget left or management is willing to give you a crazy huge amount of money: Double the number of people, buy faster computers. Provide as much Pizza as it takes... ;-) But keep the schedule!! What now? - Simply tell management/customer/whoever, that this will not work (but don't offer a reasonable alternative)? - Leave the company? - Commit suicide? - Tell anybody, every minute of a day: "Yeah, I(!!!) told you from the very first second, that this will not work. So I am out of the wood. That's all YOUR fault" Or are there other (intelligent) means, offered by an agile development approach to deal with such a situation??
William Gill
1. What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I am the Program Manager for the web version of a large and very complex software product. While our target is to have a fully agile software development environment, the reality at the moment is probably more "Waterfall influenced by Agile". Our organisational structure is large and complicated, with teams dispersed both geographically and structurally, and most software teams are responsible for delivering their product on multiple platforms for multiple programs, with naturally competing priorities. My challenge at the moment is to resolve the conflict between agile ideals and organisational reality, and to organise the Program in the ideal way to ensure we deliver a product that is end-to-end aligned with business needs and, most importantly, user needs.
2. What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? The most valuable learning for me from this conference will be to hear other people's experience with implementing and running agile software environments in complex business environments. I want to understand how others have resolved the challenges of fitting agile to the business, when the business can't fit to agile. In particular, I would like to discuss and learn about: How to best implement and adapt agile to large and very complex orginasations. How to manage dependencies across multiple teams in multiple locations with multiple priorities. How to manage cross-program priorities across multiple teams, programs and platforms. What is the true role of the Product Owner in a very large scrum system? Are they the source of product vision and innovation? Or a coordinator of backlog stories?
3. What do you plan to contribute? I would like to contribute my own experience working with SCRUM in a large and complex multi-national organisation, to share our success stories and also a little bit of "what not to do". I will also be an active and energetic participant into discussions and group sessions. Additionally, I would be happy to lead a discussion session. Potential topics could be: working with User Experience designers within an agile product development environment, or handling intrinsically waterfall processes within an agile environment (such as translation, marketing, legal, etc), or getting appropriate management and stakeholder review and buy-in, while staying true to the agile model.
Pawel Lipinski
1) 2 years of helping teams in introducing and maintaing agile practices. For a year I own a company, so I have an experience of a joint function of a boss and a coach.
2) Learning from others' experiences. How to build and care for motivation in teams.
3) Can share my experiences of joining a company lead role with team membership.
Reto M. Kiefer
1) Im working as a developer and consultant for almost 12 years in webapplication development. I am a Scrum Master and we ware just switching the develpment processes in my own company and with some of our customers to Scrum and I am taking care for this changes, coaching developers and customers alike. Moreover I am blogging and talking quite a lot about Scrum and agile best practises.
2) I am expecting a lot of new ideas, exchange with other agile practitioners and hope to learn a lot.
3) I can share my experiences with the focus on Scrum for developers and Scrum for small companies and internet agencies.
Blog: http://www.retokiefer.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/retokiefer
Michael Podvinec
I currently work at the University of Basel, where I direct the Research IT group at the Biozentrum, a basic research institute devoted to the life sciences. My interest in Agile and Scrum dates back to an introduction to Scrum by Joseph Pelrine around 2004. It made me think whether Scrum as a method could be applied to manage the risks and unknowns of scientific projects in biology and bioinformatics research. I became inducted as a CSM in 2007 - just in time: I was immediately challenged to practice my new skills by being the scrum master for a project with high impact and a near-impossible deadline. Along the way, I had to introduce the team to the agile mindset and the principal ideas of scrum, and so became an agent of change, whether I chose to or not. Further projects and teams have followed since then, and I keep finding myself in the role of agile coach, even though it may not be officially part of my job description. This also means that I occasionally write and talk about Scrum.
Learn/Explore: I am looking forward to learn about new techniques, and tales from the trenches.
Besides this, I want to reconnect with some of you, whom I've met at the XPdays, or elsewhere, and getting to know those of you I haven't yet met. My experience going to academic conferences has taught me that the really interesting stuff happens when you chat at the coffee breaks. I hear that Unconferences are better in this regard, but still I am looking forward to chat over a cup of coffee.
Some specific topics I would like to explore and learn more about:
- Agile adoption: When we make a team agile, we have to teach, to instill values and force certain behaviors in the team and the product owner. How can we justify that behavior when one of the agile tenets is to let the team self-organize? What if the team takes up "bad habits" because they choose to do so?
- Agile in non-profit/academic environments: We apply Scrum in an university setting. Here, both the composition of teams and the motivation structure is different from the "standard" industry environment.
- Agile in fields with strong regulatory requirements, e.g. Pharma or Medical Devices. (I know virtually nothing about this, but am curious...)
Contribution: Compared to the experience of some of the other participants, I know I am a coaching newbie. With my background outside of software development and my experience in university research, I hope that I can contribute a viewpoint from a different angle to the discussions. I might consider hosting a discussion on one of the specific topics above, if there is common interest.
Juliane Conradt
Working in the testing area for a company which is just in the beginning of a big change towards agile, I try to understand as much as possible all different aspects of agile. I try to find out how to manage this change from waterfall to agile, how i can help my people and what we need to do to be prepared for the future. I am especially intrested in all "peoples" aspects, in all testing aspects and in the question "how to cope with regulatory affairs (e.g. for ISO or medical device)". I would bring in an open thus sometimes critic mind, quite some experience with working with human beeings and a big curiousity for new stuff and new people.
Swen Gonsberg
As a Softwaredeveloper and Teamlead I got first in touch with SCRUM in 2003. Helping myself in moving me and the Team to a ScrumMaster and a real SCRUM Team I read lots of books. Easy I thought, just implement the process! As time goes by I noticed that it's not just the process, it is more about self-awareness, empathy and conflict management.
Having a closer look at how groups evolve from simple Coders to real Teams, that's what I am interested in, regarding my three personal findings. I contribute my thoughts on this and some practical activities.
Marc Löffler
1. I just started to coach agile teams about half a year ago so I'm quite new on this topic. Currently I'm coaching two scrum teams in a waterfall environment of a big company and trying to spread agile/scrum "bottom up".
2. I want to learn from other more experienced coaches how to survive in conservative and inflexible environments and what "switches" they used to turn individuals into high productive teams.
3. How to combine CMMI and agile processes.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scrumphony
Blog: http://scrumphony.com
Heiko Stapf
1. I worked for 3 years as Scrum Master & PO with 3 teams (as employee) - I introduced Scrum in my department
2. I am changing myself quite radical at the moment, quitting my job after 11,5years and switching to selfemployed agile coaching. I want to learn how others approach this contact and get to know the community better.
3. After a small contribution organizing accde10, I will definetelly contribute somehow, but don't know how at the moment ;)
Fahd Al-Fatish
1-I am Employ at www.andrena.de. Since 10 years till today I work and coach teams in OOP, XP and Scrum.
2-Learn new ideas and techniques, but first of all to meet interesting agile people. I want to learn more about Lean in the IT.
3-I want to share my experiences with the focus on agile development skills and managing products with scrum.
Rachel Davies
I have been working as an independent agile coach since 2003 and I have worked with many different teams. I would like to explore more about coaching distributed agile teams. I can offer to share insights from my "Agile Coaching" book and tips that I've picked up along the way.
Joseph Pelrine
# What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I've been coaching teams towards agility since my time working as Kent Beck's assistant back in 1997.
# What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? The level of intrusiveness in coaching interventions versus the level of stimulus towards self-organisation.
# How do you plan to contribute? My unique contribution is helping people understand the theoretical foundation for coaching interventions, which is found in fields such as social psychology and social complexity science.
Bernhard Findeiss
1.) My experience is (guerilla) introducing Scrum in a government agency, with the roles of team member and ScrumMaster during the past almost 2 years.
2.) I'd like to talk to other people whether they encountered similar problems as we did, and how they approached them. I also want to learn more about coaching (self-organizing) teams.
3.) I'd like to offer an OpenSpace session on the characteristics of working in a government setting, and (if anyone's interested), which factors we found contributed to team productivity, and in which way.
Mike Sutton
I'm the facilitator of the Openspace and will also run some Improv games the night before. I want to witness the joy of people self organising, learning and collaborating. I will contribute in anyway I can.
Olaf Lewitz
I started programming when I was about 15, professionally at 20. With my first leadership position, I started using/implementing/coaching XP in 2000. Since 2002, I consult our customers in their organisational change efforts including, but not limited to, the introduction of our project management software. For the past 8 years, I've teached, coached, and supported with tools process changes in a variety of software organisations from small multimedia shops to embedded, automotive, aviation and other "big" sw/system dev companies. Most of these changes included some agile (mostly Scrum) ingredients, which in some cases was even my doing;-) The single most important thing I learned in these years that the biggest issue in change initatives (be it chances or obstacles) is never the process, neither the tools, but people. Regardless of the officially published goal ("We have to reach CMMI/SPICE level x", "We have to become agile", "We need a management tool"), people are always key, because they're expected to change the way the work. I want to share experiences with you all, devise strategies, techniques and methods for fun (and even success), and just talk a lot and be part of a growing community.
Florian Eisenberg
1.) My experience "coaching" whole teams is still fairly thin, but I have been trying to subversively coach other members of my development teams into agility, trying to get them to use techniques and adopt and embrace different values to those they currently have. All of that with mixed results.
2.) I would like to like to learn from other people how they manage to coach people or groups/teams that are quite resistant/resilient to new ways and changes. I would like to get into discussion with the different leading coaches in the industry and see what they have to say about the future of agility, and especially Scrum/XP/Crystal.
3.) Ask questions that will probably lead you all to saying "it depends". I'd also like to bring in a(nother) developer's view into the discussion to oppose some of the coaches with some of the questions I usually get from my fellow coworkers.
Klaus Marquardt
What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? - I have always been part of the teams, sometime in a technical lead role. Tried to do reasonable projects and becoming ever more agile now since 1998.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference? - What are techniques to coach a team you are part of, or a team next door within your department.
How do you plan to contribute? - with a good sense of humour, and the question how to recruit coaches within the company.
Florian Munz
1. What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile? I'm not a coach and I don't think I want to become one. I'm part of an agile team as a developer for three years now.
2. What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference? I was always interested in agile topics but never felt I had the power/ability to really influence my team in fundamental ways. I want to learn if that's a misconception on my part or just how things are. I want to learn about mentoring and what that actually means.
3. How do you plan to contribute? The notion of craftsmanship fascinates me. How does that work together with lean thinking? How do you find ways to be proud of your work, even if you don't agree with everything the company/customer is doing?
Dieter Bertsch
I’m working for about three years as an Trainer and Coach for Agile software development with Scrum, XP and Kanban at Allianz Germany.
I like to discuss, how to increase agile team behaviour in a cost centre (as we are) compared to a profit centre (that has to fulfil his contracts) in an agile manner.
Another topic for me is how to deal with two product owners for one team – one responsible for the business, one responsible for the technical aspects.
Claudius Link
I have be working in different agile environments since 2004.
Since 2007 I am leading a team and introduced agile techniques acting as a coach and change agent.
I like to hear, learn, and discuss experience made introducing or using agile.
Especially with "selling-down" agile, teamwork, fostering communication, and building trust.
Sandra Sieroux
I have worked in a team that tried to establish an agile environment with a lack of support from the
management. Now I want to try my luck with a company more interested in agile, where I start a
job as scrummaster in May. I hope to learn more about enabling selforganization and growth
and to contribute my share of experience.
Maurice le Rutte
1. Introducing/applying Agile at a large, international organization, or as somebody described me:
“has a strong drive of getting things done and does not shy away from changing working methods
if necessary. Has become one of the forerunners of applying SCRUM and Agile working methods
in our company and is very knowledgable in this area.”
2. Hope to get ideas to find out on how to progress as in a company with agile.
3. Experiences, discussions,
Martin Klose
1)What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
For about 2 years I have been freelancing in a small agile team and we are about to found a company together now. I see coaching towards using best practise and improvement as part of my job.
2)What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I would like to get hints and insights form other more experienced coaches. Especially on how to better integrate clients with a different mindset into an agile process. Coaching is one part of my job so far and I would like to explore this area in more depth but also discuss on how to deal with coaching if you have other responsibilities too.
3)How do you plan to contribute?
I want to share my experience and precipitate actively in all kinds of discussions.
Status from 2010-04-25 14:56
- 50 attendees registered => 0 places available
- 50 position papers entered
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