We were used to one-on-ones between manager and managed in our past history. And we tried to reproduce this format in BestBrains, until it appeared to us, that the format wasn't really appropriate in a net-working  structure like ours, where titles doesn't really denote any superiority to others, and most - if not all - work is either invoice able or done voluntarily.

At the same time we had to deal with the challenge of being away from office a lot, so some of us would have very little daily interaction.

To overcome these problems, and still be able to maintain a fresh relationship where problems are raised early, and  give support to each others personal- and professional development,  we invented the notion of a peer-meeting. It serves as a means to get to know each other better, to coach us towards our goals and to offer feedback to peers.

We do it this way: Each month each of us are supposed to meet with one colleague for a couple of hours. We often do it with lunch in between.  Some of the meetings are held walking, I remember a particular one, where we spent an hour walking and talking in Free Town Christiania, which is just besides our offices, but where I rarely set my foot. In other meetings we have been exploring the Cafe's of Copenhagen e.g  Danish Design Center or in Glyptoteket. And one time this summer we were sitting in the cozy café Bådudlejningen at Christianshavns Canal watching tourist boats and kayaks pass by while talking about goals and ideas.

To assist the process we have created a template to structure the meeting and the preparation. In its newest version it looks like this:

Before the meeting:                          

Consider in relation to your meeting partner: What is he (sorry, but we currently are all men - looking for women to apply for a job) doing really good? Think or one or more goals and/or challenges you could offer to your conversation-partner.

Consider in relation to yourself: What do you find difficult and would like to do better? What do you thing you are really good at, and how could you share it with others?

In the meeting:

Take turns where each of you spend 45 minutes going over the items from the list, where one is mostly listening  and the other talking. Change roles.

We have been doing a couple of rounds so far and are all pleased with it. I personally think it has been a great aid in creating a strong relationship between us, that otherwise can be difficult when  where there is no formal hierarchy and economic dependencies.

By Bent Jensen

I went to a few sessions at the Agile 2009 conference related to group dynamics, hyper productive teams and corporate culture.

Help me to see... corporate culture with Tobias Mayer and Lyssa Adkins. "Using a simple yet effective collaboration game from the Improv tradition this session will challenge our assumptions and open up new neural pathways." It was a very interesting workshop with a limited number of people. Tobias showed us different techniques to describe a new reality for an agile person, an agile team and an agile organization in a collaborative and simple way without being locked in our traditional beliefs.

Help me to see... 

Scaling Up by Scaling Down: A (re)Focus on Individual Skills with Ashley Johnson and Amr Elssamadisy. The key message on this session was to focus more on developing personal agility, before trying to scaling up. The primary aspect of agile is skills and personalities (Individuals and interactions over processes and tools…).

Scaling Up by Scaling Down

Some of the quotes from sessions and discussions:

• "The pain of change has to be less than the pain of failing"
• "Trust and credibility is the glue, if you don't create it you will fail"
• "Before getting it to work in the large, we need to get it to work in the small"

I think from an agile point of view, we need to understand our craft much better and focus on business value, innovation and continuous learning.

We talk more about "How we create the solution" than "Why do we create the solution?"

We talk more about "How great we are doing" than "How we can continuously improve and be better?"

We talk more about "How can we be more productive" than "How can we create less useless features?"

I think we should focus more on

• Building a better understanding on what we are doing – create a unity of purpose
• Working with continuously improving and learning in the organization
• Teaching and using problem solving techniques
• How we structure our work with cadence, flow and pull 
• How we establishing more transparency and accountability

What do you think?

By Mads Troels Hansen

When slicing the Agile 2009 conference and looking at trends, there was a lot of talk about Kanban, Mainstream Agile and using Games for improving and learning Agile/Lean techniques. But also group dynamics, how we are working together, how we collaborate and how to create a shared vision were included in many sessions and discussions.

Games

There were many games at the conference, and it was very interesting to see how people got involved in another way when playing a game using Agile and Lean techniques, instead of trying to understand someone explaining some principles and practices. Using games in teaching will make it much more effective and fun. I will start to include more games in the future, when facilitating workshops.

Kanban

There was also a lot of "Buzz" about Kanban, and I can see a lot of interest in my Kanban talk on September 15^th. A Kanban system can be used to implement different Lean techniques in your Agile processes. It can be a more visible way to look at flow in the daily work, limit the work in progress, establishing a cadence etc.

I got a lot of interesting input to use on my Kanban talk on September 15^th and also to include a Kanban game instead of different exercises on the Kanban workshop on October 28^th.

Experience reports

Experience reports were also a main topic, and it is very important to capture and share the learning from real life problems, failures and success.

You can get the experience report I wrote for the conference from http://tinyurl.com/CmmiAgile and the slides from the Agile 2009 session on http://tinyurl.com/nk2g5p. It is about Agile with distributed team, scaling Agile teams, creating a kaizen culture across many teams and continues to deliver more business value.

Collaboration tools

Looking back at the conference, I also see a trend for more collaborative Agile tools. Many people talked about tools to support better collaboration and communication. I have a number of business cards from different venders, who created a new Agile tool with more collaboration and asked me to have a look at the free version. It will be interesting to see how those tools will evolve in the future.

I also talked with some people from EMC | Conchango and played with their integration between TFS and a smart board. See picture below. Using the smart board, you collaborate with stories from TFS, do estimation with planning poker cards and have the values saved directly back into TFS. A fun and costly solution.

EMC| Conchango software integration a Smartboard into TFS

A cheaper solution is the Wii virtual whiteboard from Johnny Chung Lee. http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/. It can be a easy way to make a virtual task board, see also this YouTube video.

By Mads Troels Hansen

In this slice about inspiration from Agile 2009, I will write about the inspiring elements from different sessions and discussions with other participants. It will be more facts than thoughts and trends (I will cover that in later blog posts, slicing the Agile 2009 conference).

For me, the primary source of inspiration was from the workshops involving some kind of games. Games can be a great way to learn about different practices, principles and tools. Especially because they don't have elements from your daily work, so the collaboration between the participants often will be much better and focus on the complete team, a shared goal and not specific roles (well, well, I know we have all those agile cross functional teams…but…).

I went to The Business Value Game with Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. It was a game about how to deliver maximum business value, prioritization, estimate business value and collaboration between different roles. The session was a bit chaotic with too many people in the room, but it got some really interesting concepts. It was also interesting to see how people got engaged in the game. I observed many people focusing quite a lot on learning the game rules and less on optimizing the business value. For example in my team, we did not talk about remove stories from the game to release more frequent, but tried to maximize the delivery of ALL stories. Maybe it was because the session had too many people and we did not have the time to think on that strategy, but it might also be a pattern in many real teams?

The Business Value Game

Portia and Pascal also facilitated the The Bottleneck Game, and some of my colleges from BestBrains went to that workshop. It was a game about options, Theory of Constraints, System Thinking and collaboration on a common goal. It is a great way to learn those agile and lean techniques. I will defiantly use this game with different teams.

I also went to The Kanban Game with Tsutomu Yasui. It was also a workshop with too many people and it took some time before we had enough problems to manage in the iterations of the game. After the first iteration it got more interesting and had some good elements. I think the game could be much better, by not having the first iteration and maybe facilitate the usage of different Kanban elements.

The Kanban Game

Another fun and inspiring workshop was May the Forces Be With You, Exploring the Forces Driving and Restraining Agile with Rod Claar and Douglas Shimp. We created two teams, the Drivers and the Restrainers and had to present different forces in a humoristic way for some selected judges. It was a fun way to explore the forces driving and restraining agile

May the Forces Be With You

"Flirting" With Your Customers with Jenni Dow and Ole Jepsen was a fresh way of looking at the customer relationship using 8 steps to build a good customer relationship. It was fun and interesting.

Flirting With Your Customers

The last session I will include in this slice, was a workshop, First, kill all the Metrics!, with Niel Nickolaisen and Chris Matts. We talked about many potential meaningful metrics, but did not find some really good examples in my group. I might reflect more on this area in a later Agile 2009 slice.

First kill all the Metrics!

Talking with other participants were also fund and inspiring, but I did not had the time to talk with enough people. It was inspiring to hear agile and lean stories from the trenches around the world, even though many people and teams seem to struggle with retrospectives and problem solving techniques.

By Mads Troels Hansen

In this slice about the Agile 2009 venue, I will write about the city, the hotel and include some elements from the two keynotes.

I liked to be in Chicago, it is a pleasant city with a breathtaking skyline. People asked me a couple of times, if I needed any help when I tried to figure out where I was on my city map. It looked like the residents were quite relaxed and helpful. Not like in some other US cities I have visited. The hotel was ok, but not special. Most of the conference rooms were located in the basement, so I used many of the breaks to get up and out of the building to breath fresh air.

Back in time, there has been a lot of innovation in Chicago and the city plans and architecture are quite unique. In 1871 there was the big fire in Chicago, where 17,500 buildings were destroyed, many people got homeless and a large part of the city had to be rebuilt. Chicago also had another very special problem: It stood on swamp. Actually they changed the catastrophe into an opportunity and found an innovative solution to the swamp problem by constructing the world's first completely iron-and-steel-framed building. The skyscraper.

It is interesting to think about the reason behind inventing and constructing the skyscraper. They had a huge problem, and found an elegant solution to solve it. That’s innovation! Maybe we could learn something about innovation by looking back at the invention of the first skyscraper?

In the second keynote at the Agile 2009 conference, Jared M. Spool talked about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. Jared talked about how to integrate the needs from the users in the design process and not “just” build more software. “Unfortunately” he had several examples of companies using billions of $ on designs that did not deliver more business value. I think we often in the software community are more focused on delivering more software in a high effective way, than actually inventing the innovative solutions. The solution with the skyscraper was great, because it was a solution to a huge need after the big fire and the problem with the city on swamp. It was tomorrow’s solution for today’s problem.

We might find much more value by looking at why we build software rather than building more software faster and faster!

In the first keynote, Alistair Cockburn talked about agile being more main stream, the iceberg is melted down in the ocean. He also talked about how important it still was to have trust and effective communication. It was very entertaining, but I think there is still a long way to have agile out in the big enterprises.

By Mads Troels Hansen