All the Written Feedback from "Building the Lean Web Development Team" in Bristol 14/10/09

Negative/Could do Better

• Would like some of the examples that string it all together.  To summarise learning.  Maybe there is a good one in the books.
• Always nice to have an agenda at the beginning.
• Is there anything else that is diagrammable?
• Not sure how useful the 'What is it like? What is it not like?  exercise was.
• Attendees should come from a cross-section of an organisation.
• More discussion needed on value dynamic, and on suppliers.  I'm not sure I'm getting it yet (I know they are different issues).
• Feel slightly overwhelmed.
• Would be good to hear about a team who are doing this... how you might see this working.
• Next steps are big risks to take - help!
• Have more questions now than answers - maybe this is an unrealistic expectation because nobody has done this before.
• Not sure of the relevance of the "What is web dev like or not like?" section.  Maybe some poignant note with summaries of your points would be helpful.
• I am unsure whether the point you made about roles required in a web dev team was actually answered.  So was there a point?

Good Points

• The diagram of flow was really handy, sound.  That made lots of sense.
• Liked all of the activities, especially like the mind-clearing ones.
• Showed the importance of thinking outside your own values system.
• Nice selection of further reading to think about.
• Easily accessible course.
• Been thinking about a few of these things before the training - good to hear it from a professional experienced guy though.
• It's good to have a few people to get tailored adviced.
• I like the method of teaching where you encourage students to come up with the answer themselves.
• Some good practical steps sections where we learnt how to apply to our organisation.
• Great to learn about processes that we can directly take away and apply practically to our own companies.
• Definitely going to promote the idea of rewarding quick sign-off.
• I like your analogies.  They help me understand the concepts and how they relate to my business.
• Chance to talk about things with other people in a similar situation.
• Value Dynamic.
• Practical things to try out, if my staff can cope :-)
• Mark's experience of working with difference web agencies.
• Great ideas, inspiring possibilities
• Value chain exercise
• Interactive bits

 

For further information, contact mark.stringer@gmail.com (07736 807 604)

What are you doing for lunch?

Do you work for or run a small to medium sized web development agency? Do you suspect that your team would benefit from some training in project management, but you can't see where you would get the time to send anybody on a training course for a whole day, let alone, go yourself. We might be able to help you.

Many of our customers are *very* busy small to medium-sized web development agencies. They don't have time to go on a delegate course and they certainly don't have time to let all of their staff "lose" a day on an in-house training course. Therefore, we're offering our well-established, well reviewed one-day "Introduction to Agile" course in three new flavours - Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.

The idea is simple. We break the six hour course into four 90-minute sessions and arrange to give those on your company's premises in either a breakfast, lunch or dinner (end of day) slot.

Of course, you could get through the whole course in a week, but it's probably better to spread it over several weeks, to improve the chances of retaining information and to give time between sessions to reflect on current process.

Example schedule - what would go in the four sessions?

Session 1:

• Getting to know you.
• Traditional project management methods vs Agile, iterative methods
• Why the web is different

Session 2:

• Stories: How do stories differ from use cases and other specifications?
• Estimation: Planning poker and other effective ways of estimating work quickly.

Session 3:

• Prioritisations: Always work on what's of most value to the customer
• Iterations: Plan work for a short, fixed period of time.
• Tests: Use tests so that you always know when you're done.

Session 4:

• Velocity: The power of knowing what you're capable of as a team
• Meetings: How are meetings different in an Agile project, what meetings do you need to have? How are they run?
• Role of the Project Manager: What does a PM do in an Agile Project?

We can also can also run several single-session seminars - "The role of the Product Owner in the Agile Process" and "Software without tears - negotiations and difficult conversations in software development."

We can also mix and match sessions to provide a custom solution for your company.

Contact us if you're interested in having us run a course in your organisation for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Negotiators know how to make the pie bigger - learn how to do this as part of our "Software without tears" seminar in an Agile Lab lunch time session.

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

We know all the theory right? So now all we have to do is put it into practice? How hard can that be?

I read a blog post a couple of weeks ago about how to keep your brain sharp as you get older. This is the kind of thing that is to Twitter (with the oldest average age of any social media network) what relationship quizzes are to fashion magazines.

I don't remember most of the recommendations (probably because I'm getting old - boom! boom!), but one of the suggestions was that you try to do things with the "wrong" hand. I'm left-handed and all the way through school struggled to write as quickly and as neatly as my right-handed school mates. And trying it out has revealed to me a marvellous instant demonstration of the difference between theory and practice.

Right-handed writing, the first time I tried it

So, for several weeks now, I've been writing my morning journal with my right hand instead of my left. It isn't easy. I'm a lot more relaxed now, but when I first started doing it, it was physically demanding. I found myself having to deliberately stop myself from gritting my teeth and curiously jutting my jaw - sort of like somebody might act if they were trying to amputate their own leg in an action movie.

And the writing itself was diabolical.

I would often find myself just heading off in the wrong direction with the pen, or "losing it" altogether and not being able to write anything at all.

But of course, the more I've done it, the easier it's got. Very early on in the process it dawned on me "Hey! I already know how to write! I already know all the letters of the alphabet and how to put them in the right order. In other words, I already know all the THEORY of writing, but that doesn't mean that it's any easier to put the thing into practice."

Three weeks later - better but still room for improvement

When you try writing with your wrong hand you realise very quickly that putting theory into practice is a separate process from understanding the theory. For handwriting, putting theory into practice involves changing the way muscles and neurons work, storing new information inside them, and that's a non-trivial process that takes time.

There's the learning that, and then there's the learning how and very often they're two seperate processes.

Some points that I've noticed about trying to experimenting with this radical change:

• If I take the trouble to visualise a word before I write it, writing the word feels much easier and looks much better.
• Doing something so strange, results in the whole of your body tensing up which results in terrible handwriting. But if you relax too much, that's no good either, nothing happens. You have to actively look for a balance between focus and relaxation.
• When you first start doing it, you're knackered after half an hour, actually, probably about ten minutes.
• Latin characters are designed to be written right-handed. There's a kind of rolling flow to writing right-handed that you never feel when you write with your left hand. Every now and then I feel this "flow", normally when I forget that I'm writing with the wrong hand and concentrate on what I'm writing.
• Exploring all the possibilities of writing with my right hand, cutting loose, letting go, scribbling and shading, drawing big shapes and small shapes, tiny stick men and perfect circles, seems to improve things just as much, if not more than simply concentrating tighter and tighter control and getting the letters perfect. Periods of "going crazy" scribbling and doodling followed by focussed concentration seem to work best of all.

Left-hand writing, perfected over about 36 years.

Any of this got anything to do with Agile? With training? With Lean and Kanban and experimenting with new methodologies? I dunno, what do you think?

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Notes on Rachel Davies workshop "The Role of the Agile Coach"

Rachel Davies ran a very interesting workshop yesterday at MiniSPA2009 on "The Role of the Agile Coach."

I won't give away the details of her workshop, but suffice to say that it involved some people working on a task and other people taking management roles. It looks like a very simple activity, but to me it felt like a re-run of the Stanford Prison Experiment with non-toxic glue and feathers.

Some observations from the experience:

• Even though Rachel's an Agile coach and this workshop was supposed to be about Agile coaching, everybody, especially those in management roles seem to treat this as a waterfall project, even down to trying to treat the instructions that came with the activity packs as a fixed spec.
• I was a worker, and as a worker my main motivations were to bond with my other workers and to make myself useful. I didn't really take any notice of the coach who was there supposedly to ask questions.
• Comments from the two people who were asked to take on management roles were almost all critical. In a sense, this was an artefact of the task - what else did they have to do but point out what they thought was going wrong?
• The spec for the task was very loose, but that didn't stop some people who were in management roles adding in extra assumptions, assuming spec where there wasn't any. And assuming that part of the task was to hammer down the spec.
• I found myself saying "We thought we were being creative, but management just thought we had no idea what we were doing." Oh boy did this chime! To some degree with my experience at Xerox, but especially with my experience working in research at Universities.
• We got fascinated with the task and missed a (perceived to be) crucial aspect of the spec. In the end I fixed this as I walked up to submit our entry. "Management" on our team perceived this to be a grave failing, even though my last minute solution worked.
• As a team of workers, we instinctively seemed to understand that we had to feel each other out and understand what we capable of - I think this is what's called the "Forming and Storming" sections of team building. Management focussed instantly on the "Norming and Performing" and fretted and criticised as it watched our "Forming and Norming" activities.

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Very Pleased

About this:

"Mark recently helped us to implement a SCRUM project management tool to streamline our project process. He helped this to happen while also bringing his experience to bear in advising the team on best practice and training them in SCRUM and product ownership. Mark is a really nice guy, an expert in his field, and has really made some significant improvements to our team's ability to plan and deliver projects for the business. Many thanks - and I hope our paths cross again."

Damian Stafford, Group Operations Director at Lawton Communications Group
(quoted from LinkedIn)


For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Introduction To Agile Methods - Wednesday 5th August 2009 in Bristol

I'm running the newly updated version of my every popular "Introduction To Agile Methods" course in Bristol on Wednesday 5th August in Bristol. We're running the course in the excellent Watershed Media Centre, right in the centre of Bristol.

This is a one day course. Fees, £350 or (£300 early bird, before 15th July). Please contact me directly to book places.

The Watershed Media Centre, Bristol

Course outline

Course schedule


For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Agile Training - Why Bother?

This is an article about a blog post I don't like. Here is one by Paul Dyson on Agile project management that I really do like. Why aren't many other people thinking so closely about what the project manager actually does?

Why Bother?

Why bother with Agile Training? Isn't it just a waste of time? When you search for "Agile Training Blog" using Google - one of the first posts that comes up is a three year old post on a dead blog (hey you Google boys - are you sure this is right?) claiming that Agile training is a waste of time. The gist of the post is that when you attend an Agile training course you're going to get one of two things for your money: either you'll get taken through all the Agile concepts or you'll be regaled with war stories of the trainer's Agile experiences.

Education Bad

The point of the author of the "Why Bother with Agile Training?" blog post is that either of these approaches is a waste of time. If the course is just a lecture that takes you through the standard Agile ideas and concepts, you could have just as easily read about these in a book. If the course is just a collection of war stories, the chances are that they aren't going to apply to your situation.

Wrong and Wrongerer

I don't agree with either criticism. It's always useful to have someone who understands the material to take you through it. There are a couple of aspects of Agile - stories, velocity - that in my experience people don't immediatiately "get". And the idea that you can't learn from other people's stories because they aren't in the same situation as you is just strange. How else could you learn most things? If someone tells you not to put your hand in the fire, because it burns, what do you do? Say to yourself? "Oh that was a completely different fire, not comparable to this fire at all. Ow! Ow! Ow! Don't just stand there! Call an ambulance!"

Can you Feel it?

But the most important reason why I disagree with this post is because I think there's a third kind of experience that you can get from training. An experience of what it feels like to do things in a new way. And that's why I work really hard to develop and improve the exercises that I include in my courses. Through the exercises, I want to give people an idea of what it actually feels like to take a brief for a project, break it into stories and then develop it iteratively, using time-boxed iterations. By the end of these exercises, there's a much better chance that they "get" what I mean by a story and have a feeling for how to calculate velocity and use it in future iterations.


Fire - like they say in the "War stories" - it burns. (Picture courtesy of . SantiMB .)

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Introduction to Agile Methods – One Day Course

Are you involved in the specification, purchase, project management or delivery of an IT or web-based project? If so, you need to know about Agile methods. Agile methods, are a group of new techniques which make it easier to deliver IT and web-based projects in environments of uncertainty and constant change. Did you ever try to plan a project but things didn't go quite as you expected?

Agile methods are designed to deal with that kind of experience. They emphasise the delivery of projects in short iterations: the end of each iteration, priorities can be re-ordered or new ones can be added making sure that you are always delivering to the client the things that they value most.

This introductory course will give you an immediate feel for the difference that working using Agile techniques can have for the IT projects that you work on. Attending this course will allow you to: Provide the most value in the work that you do for you client; plan your work in short iterations; deal with new and unexpected information and changes as a project progresses; improve your estimates of how long work will take; and deliver what you say you'll deliver, when you say you'll deliver it.

Suitable for people working as either a producer or project manger or software developer in any new media or software development environment. Also suitable for people involved in the specification and procurement of software. No programming skills required.

This entry as pdf

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Agile for Programme and Project Managers

A crucial part of the Agile approach is to “Start from where you are”. This one-day course won’t advocate the complete overthrow of any project management approach. Rather, through some teaching and a lot of hands-on case studies and activities, it seeks to add Agile techniques to the project manager’s existing repertoire.

What is Agile?

We give a brief outline of the Agile Project Management approach and how it differs from other more conventional approaches. We explain why an agile approach is a much better fit for many new media and software development projects.

Estimation

What can estimation do to help you? What can’t it do? Why do people feel so bad when they get their estimates wrong? We delve a little bit into the psychology of estimation. Then we explain how the Agile concept of velocity can help you and your team to improve estimates and provide the psychological detachment from estimates that is essential for good negotiation.

Negotiation

One of the major benefits of an agile project management approach is that it offers repeated opportunities for re-negotiation throughout the course of a project. But you can only take advantage of these opportunities if have appropriate negotiation skills and are willing to have difficult. We take you through the principles of negotiation that you need to get best deal for you and your customer at every stage of a project.

Risk Management

How can Agile help to reduce risk for you and your customer? We explain the Agile concepts of prioritisation and velocity. We show how these concepts work to ensure that your team is always working on the thing that is of most value to your customer and is within realistic budgets and time scales.

Getting buy-in

How can you persuade your senior management, your customers and your team that Agile can help deliver projects more effectively? How can you still get some of the benefits of Agile approaches even if those you work for and those you work with still insist on more conventional approaches to project management? We discuss strategies for introducing effective Agile methods into real-world workplaces.

This entry as pdf

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Technical Aspects of Agile – Two-day course

Aimed at developers and team leaders who are already familiar with Agile approaches, this course with three important technical aspects of Agile software development.

Pair Programming

To many people, especially in senior management, pair programming seems completely counter-intuitive. Surely, by getting two people to do the job of one person you're just halving your productivity? A substantial body of research shows quite the opposite - that pair programming doesn't reduce productivity, but maintains productivity whilst substantially reducing the number of serious defects that are found in the code.

This course covers the very good reasons for introducing pair programming and how to deal with some of the potential objections. It also deals with how to start pair programming - what are the do's and don'ts and provides course participants with some hands-on experience of programming with other people.

Test Driven Development

The practice of writing a failing automatic test for each piece of software functionality, together with a script that can run all of these tests has many beneficial effects on the process of software development. This course gives participants experience of writing tests and then coding against them using the well-known testing framework JUnit.

Re-factoring

As software development progresses on a project, code gets messy and changes in one place cause unexpected problems in others. Re-factoring accepts the reality that code gets messy over time and builds on the advantages of TDD (test-driven development) to allow principled clean up of code. Course participants will be given a chance to clean up the kind of horridly entangled bits of code they might experience and be shown the possible benefits of re-factoring for the ongoing support of the code base.

Attending this course will allow you to: transform the way you write software by getting hands-on experience of three important technical aspects of Agile – Pair Programming, Test Driven Development and Refactoring.

Suitable for: Software developers and leaders of software development teams. Working knowledge of the java programming language required.

Contact: Mark Stringer
Email: mark@agilelab.co.uk
Mobile: 07736 807 604

This entry as pdf

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

Agile Training

Agile Training Course in Central London
Thursday May 28th at the University of Westminster.

We're running our most successful and popular course - Introduction to Agile Methods - for a second time in conjunction with NMK at the University of Westminster.

For further information email mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Why bother with Agile training?

Just heard this quote from David Allen author of "Getting Things Done":

"Do you folks understand that when they jump you in the dark alley - it's too late to train?"

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

A Hammer in the Hand - a Screwdriver in the Toolbox

My dad calls it "Manchestering" (probably just a casual contempt of Lancastrians from a Yorkshireman). It was what he'd do when he found himself needing to screw in a screw and not being bothered to go to the toolbox and find the right screwdriver - he would try to put the screws in using a hammer. It would rarely work. Rather than obliging and going straight in as my dad hoped, the screws would simply transfer the energy of the blow to the surrounding door, panel or whatever it was, sometimes causing the whole thing to shake apart.

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I'm not sure where I read that but I think it's very true. One way of looking at Agile Training is as a way of extending your toolkit. We're not the kind of people who try to tell our clients that they don't know what they're doing. Most of them have fantastic management skills, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from a few more.

But most of the time, training isn't enough. It isn't enough to go to the trouble of going out and getting a screwdriver and putting it in the toolbox (like paying and going on a training course). When it gets to that crucial point where you've got a screw in one hand and a hammer in the other, you're still going to need some gentle encouragement to put the hammer down and root around for the screwdriver. And that's where Agile Coaching comes in.
For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

Introduction to Agile Training Course in Central London

We will be running our "Introduction to Agile Methods" one-day training course in Central London on Tuesday 3rd March 2009. The course will be run in conjunction with New Media Knowledge (NMK).

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

Agile Training in Plymouth - January 28th 2009

We know times are hard, so if you're anywhere in the South West of England, this is an opportunity to get our "Introduction to Agile Methods" course at a very modest price.

We are running our ever-popular "Introduction to Agile Methods" course in Plymouth on the 28th January.

This course will be a bit different - the fee is only £45! and we will be filming Matt and me so that we can use bits of the training as part of a video.

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

What we do - Agile Coaching

If you're thinking about doing some Agile training you're making the right decision. but you probably need some Agile coaching as well.

Training is great. It's good for getting everybody using the same vocabulary. It's good for introducing a lot of new ideas in a short space of time. But training has it's limits. The people who get the most out of our course are those who back them up with a programme of coaching.

Agile coaching is about helping people change the way that they work in their own work environments. This rarely happens quickly. Agile coaching is about giving encouragement when it's needed but also supplying options. Agile coaching is about providing you and your team with confidence to change whilst dealing with the real world, the real time constraints, the real scepticism and resistance of others in the organisation.

What we do - Agile Training

Our "Introduction to Agile Methods" training course has been improved considerably over the last year. We've added several new activities - the Romeo and Juliet activity which helps people understand the concepts of "working software" and "minimum iteration".

We've also worked hard on our explanation of "stories" which seemed to be the concept that caused the most trouble for people who attended our course.

Then, when we're getting near the end of the day and most of the main Agile concepts have been introduced, we do our stand-up meeting exercise. This is always an interesting experience. As with many of the activities that we do through the day, even though it's only "pretend", people get very involved! As much as you could in a training course, people get a feel for what it's actually like to use Agile methods.

Marmite and Toast: an introduction to project management

Marmite and Toast gives people a chance to learn the basics of project management and to compare waterfall or industrial approaches to project management with Agile or iterative approaches.

This training was adapted from previous sessions run by Mark Stringer and Matt Gould for a half day for Wired Sussex's Brighton Internship Programme.

Feel free to check out the presentation.

Marmite%20and%20Toast.pdf

Marmite and Toast

We will be running a half-day introduction to project management workshop for the Wired Sussex intern programme on 22nd October down in Brighton. We decided to call the workshop 'Marmite and Toast' because we feel that when it comes to project management some people love it, some people hate it, some prefer it one way and some another, just like Marmite.

The intern programme is for new graduates looking to get into the digital media industry. Our aim on the 22nd is to give interns a basic understanding of how to recognise a waterfall or an Agile project approach and to understand the strengths and challenges of the two schools of thought. The interns will be spending 6 weeks working in digi-industry companies in Brighton and as we know from our conversations with local businesses, some of these companies will be working using waterfall methods, some Agile and some a mixture of the two. Therefore it is really important that people at the start of their careers have a basic awareness of the two approaches.

Places still available on the Introduction to Agile course in Bristol

There are still a few places available on our "Introduction to Agile Methods" course in Bristol on 29th October 2008. It's at the fabulous Watershed, right in the centre of town, which means for those of you who really can't leave their email alone, there's wifi at lunch and in the breaks and for those who can, there's a great cafe/bar. I think it's going to be a good course - we've already got a bunch of people from some really interesting companies coming along.

The course costs £200 for the day, contact Mark Stringer at mark@agilelab.co.uk or 07736 807 604 to book a place.

Introduction to Agile in Cambridge on 30th July

We are running our ever-popular and successful "Introduction to Agile Methods" one-day course in Cambridge at the St John's Innovation Centre on the 30th July 2008. Course fee is £200 but if you're the founder or one of the senior officers in a small company, it may be that you're entitled to a full refund of the cost of the course under a government scheme (one person attending has already qualified).

If you wish to book a place, please contact Mark Stringer on 07736 807 604 or email him at mark@agilelab.co.uk.

One Day Agile Training in Bristol

Introduction to Agile Training in Bristol, Wednesday 29th October 2008

Agile Lab are running our popular and successful one "Introduction to Agile Methods" course at the marvelous Watershed venue in Bristol on 29th October 2008. To make a booking please contact Mark Stringer.

email: mark@agilelab.co.uk
phone: 01273 726 030
mobile: 07736 807 604

Course Fee: £200 (Early bird fee - to 14th July, £150).

Agile Lab now offering three courses in conjuction with 01ZeroOne and NMK

Agile Lab is now offering three courses in central London at 01zero-one and in conjunction with NMK New Media Knowledge. The three courses are Introduction to Agile, Agile Methods for Managers and Technical Aspects of Agile - as detailed here in the course flyer.

Agile Lab to Run a Training Course at the London Games Festival

Agile Lab are going to be running an Introduction to Agile course at the London Games Festival in London in October 2008. This will be in conjunction with 01ZeroOne. More details to follow, nearer the time.

Agile Training in Central London

Introduction to Agile Training in Central London, Wednesday 2nd July 2008

After the success of the course that we ran in March, we are running another training course in central London on Wednesday 2nd July 2008 in association with 01Zero-One. This is the popular and previously well-received course "Crawl Before You Leap".

The course is suitable for anyone who wants to get an introduction to Agile methods and who wants to get a hands-on feel for how it feels to work in an Agile fashion. No programming knowledge is required.

Agile Lab Courses

Scheduled Training Courses

Date	Title	Location	Fee	Contact
Wednesday 20th January 2010	Building the Lean Web Development Team	The Hatton, Central London	£350	Email mark.stringer@gmail.com or phone 07736 807 604 (book online)