Building the Lean Web Development Team

20th January 2010, Hatton Garden, Central London

I'm running my course "Building the Lean Web Development Team" on 20th January 2010 in central London. Here are some quotes from people who've already been on the course.

"Great to learn about processes that we can directly take away and apply practically to our own companies."

"I like your analogies. They help me understand the concepts and how they relate to my business."

"The diagram of flow was really handy, sound. That made lots of sense."

Click Here to Book Online

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

4 Reasons for Doing Anything (and why you should attend Building the Lean Web Development Team)

I recently read somewhere that there are only four kinds of reasons that persuade anybody to do anything. Since I sincerely think that anybody who has anything to do with web development should DO MY COURSE - Building the Lean Web Development Team, I thought I'd try all four of them.

Everybody is Doing this Course

Well, actually they're doing similar courses. Almost everybody involved with software development is now taking a look at Lean and Kanban. If you do this course, you'll be joining hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people worldwide who are realising that the approach of the Toyota Motor Company has something to teach them about their own business. But Shhh. Don't tell everybody this. Hang on a minute, what am I saying do tell everybody this. It's really important: Web development is different from making cars. Lots of people are talking about Lean and Kanban getting in consultants and going on courses, but they're trying to take what worked for making cars and clumsily attach it with staples and masking tape to the rather different process of software development. The differences between traditional software development and web development are mere details: kinds of details that Toyota's process guru Taiichi Ohno made a world-beating company by paying attention to.

Nobody is Doing this Course

If you do this course, you'll be in an elite minority. You'll be a rebel, a revolutionary, a true visionary. Almost nobody else is actually taking the principles that Taiichi Ohno used to develop the world's biggest car company and using them to actually understand and radically change the way people do web development. What most people are trying to do is to modify the practices which is, to be frank, just a little bit crazy. If you do this course, you won't just be giving your company a head start, because most companies will never be able to see web development this way. This course will teach you to look at your web development team in a way that will allow you to massively improve the effectiveness of what you do.

If you don't DO THIS COURSE Bad things will happen

If you don't do this course, or apply the kind of the ideas that we deal with in this course, bad things will happen to your Web development team. Quite simply, you will be overtaken by the web development companies and teams that do start to shape the way they work by the unique nature of web development problems. You won't be able to compete with these teams in terms of quality, cost or speed of turnaround. You know what's even worse? Evidence from what happened in the car industry is that even when things are utterly disastrous, you won't be able to see the problem.

If you do DO THIS COURSE Good things will happen

Lean web development is about learning to see web development for what it really is. Once you start to understand that "project management" is not a set of rules which you can learn on a course, but an attitude, once you decide to shape your team so that it is continually changing to match the shape of the problems that you have to solve, things get better. Once you start to understand concepts that are particularly pertinent to web development and not particularly pertinent to car manufacture, such as the difference between value demand and failure demand, you are in a position to give your customer what they want and to make money doing it.

Money, Money, Money

Number 5 of the 4 reasons why anybody does anything. I'm not that big a fan of using money as a way of motivating people but... Once you understand what the value is that you're delivering to your customer, you can work on getting that value to flow through your team really fast. The more value the work you do has to your customers, the more they'll want from you, the more they'll pay you.

Money Back

I'm so convinced that this course is going to help you build a better, more effective, web development team that makes you lots and lots of money that I'm offering a money back guarantee - if you come on this course and you don't feel that it's delivered what it promised, I'll give you your money back. No arguments. No hassles, no questions asked.

Money for Free

If you don't think this course is right for you, but you know somebody who it would suit to a tee. Tell them to mention your name when they book the place and I'll give you a 10% affiliates fee.


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

Affiliate Policy

OK, this is my affiliate policy, which, as far as I can see is far more generous than some people's, not mentioning no names, Amazon.

It's this: if someone books a course with me and they mention your name, I send you 10% of the course fee (so with my current course: "Building the Lean Web Development Team", if you send someone in my direction, I would send you £35).  If you were to send a big chunk of consultancy my way - your cut could be considerably more than that.

So please, if you know anybody who's working in web development, or trying to manage a web development team, or trying to work with a web development team, send them in my direction and tell them to mention your name. 

It'll be worth your while.

If you know anybody who wants someone to help them get their web or software development teams working in a more Lean, more Agile way and needs a consultant, or coach to help them do it, again:

I'm your man

And there could be something in it for you.

Disclaimer: If I think you're doing anything dodgy, or spamming people, or trying to trick people into buying my courses or for any other reason I think that you're not being perfectly above board and honest in your recommendation, not only will I be very annoyed, I reserve the right not to pay you. Be nice.


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

Building the Lean Web Development Team - 27th November central London

This course will be run at The Hatton

This course is the v1.0 of the beta course that I ran in Bristol 6 weeks ago.  Improved as a result of the great feedback that I got from that course.


Waste

This is the focus of a lot of discussions about Lean, but it's not the focus of this course. The focus is on:
* understanding what it is that you do
* which bits of that are actually of value to your customer
* how can you let them flow through your organisation quicker and more smoothly
* how can you stop yourself doing the things that don't add value

Value Stream Mapping

One way of looking at a business is an entity that creates value. A very simple scheme for reducing waste is to map what the value is that you're providing to your customers and then doing what you can to reduce, or completely eliminate any other activities which do not provide value to the customers.

Another way of improving the value stream is to make sure that value work flows steadily through the organisation with value being added at each stage. Through mapping the stream we can see how it can be reconfigured so that value added at one stage flow directly into the next stage where value is added.

With web development teams, my experience is that there can be problems here with flow of value into and out of the development team, there can be also problems with the timing of adding in design elements and content elements that are not independent from software functionality.

Flow

A central concept in the Toyota Production system is that work is carried out most efficiently if it flows through the team. It follows that this can't be done if every part of the process is running at 100% because, inevitable, the capacity of some parts of the chain will have higher capacity and some other parts of the chain will have lower capacity. The very first thing to do to improve flow through a team is to look at points along the production chain where work is building up.

In web development, this point is often testing. There are several ways of reducing this bottle neck:

* training up the whole team so that they can work in testing when there is work building up there.
* Abandoning testing as a separate function all together and relying on a comprehensive approach to Test Driven Development
* Pulling work through the system only at the rate that the lowest capacity section of the chain can deal with.
* Reducing the workload for the most experienced team members and using their extra capacity to improve the skills of less-experienced team members.


Kanban

I'm reluctant to use Japanese words when talking about Lean - as you see I've used very few - because one of my rules is that "Agile is not a license to speak Elvish or Klingon". Kanban simply ways of signalling what work needs doing and also of communicating to the team how they are performing.

Kanban is the system of signals that create flow of value through a team. One way of using a Kanban system is to create "pull" through the team so that work is only initiated when there is capacity further down the stream for it to be dealt with.

Continual Re-skilling

The rate at which required web-related skills change is extremely fast. In my experience with "old fashioned" software development there was a tendency for management to actually try to prevent its staff for from re-skilling (e.g. so that they would be available to work on COBOL projects, ADA projects, I've done them both). Now this would be an extremely dangerous thing to do - for both management and employees.

At the same time, the depth and variety of skills required means that it is very difficult for employees to acquire these skills "in their own time". One of the challenges of applying Lean to Web development is to figure out how to include continual improvement in the skills of the team into the web development process. It may be that this involves allowing some team members to work at less than full capacity (as the requirement for even flow through the process might dictate anyway) and expecting that the team members fill this time with re-skilling activities.

What is it?

One way of thinking about Taiichi Ohno - the inventor of the Toyota Production System - is that he was someone who really knew what a car factory was, what it was supposed to do, and how to make it do those things better. I'm not sure anybody knows what a web development team is (if there's only one kind of thing), what it's supposed to do, and how to make it better. I think this is really good news in some sense because people who can work this stuff out will be in a very competitive position - as are Toyota.

One of the areas we discussed here was that everybody I talked to in web development either doesn't know which bits make money, or knows that it is the bits other than bespoke web development.

Structure of "Building the Lean Web Development Team"

Session 1

Run through Lean Concepts

* Brief History of Lean and the Toyota Production System
* Value Streams, Waste and Flow
* How does Lean relate to web development

Session 2

Approaches to identifying the Value stream

Value stream mapping exercise

Session 3

Benefits of Flow

Flow and Kanban exercise

Mistake-Proofing and Poka Yoke

Session 4

What is it?

Open discussion

* Possible problems with adoption
* identification of next steps


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

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)

Building the Lean Web Development Team - Course 14th October Watershed Arts Centre, Bristol

This is a discussion and then an outline of the proposed Beta course - "Building the Lean Web Development Team" that I'm going to run at the Watershed Arts Centre in Bristol. As I've pointed out in previous posts, this course is still in development, so I'm offering at the cost of the hire of the hall and lunch - 50 pounds per head.


Waste

One of the central concepts in Lean is waste reduction, but waste can come in many forms. Perhaps some of the forms of waste that don't leap to mind are waste through over-production and waste that results through continual work of resources people - or machines at 100%.

In software, as in car production, a great deal of waste comes from re-work - things that are regarded as finished but which need to be returned for more work to correct errors.

On the web a lot of re-work is generated by "small stuff" discovered the testing function - browser compatibility is the one that comes up again and again - typos, broken links due to move from development to test hosting, adding unexpected text to form fields. I'd like to explore ways that this kind of waste can be reduced.

Value Stream Mapping

One way of looking at a business is an entity that creates value. A very simple scheme for reducing waste is map what the value is that you're providing to your customers and then doing what you can to reduce, or completely eliminate any other activities which do not provide value to the customers.

Another way of improving the value stream is to make sure that value work flows steadily through the organisation with value being added at each stage. Through mapping the stream we can see how it can be reconfigured so that value added at one stage flow directly into the next stage where value is added.

With web development teams, my experience is that there can be problems here with flow of value into and out of the development team, there can be also problems with the timing of adding in design elements and content elements that are not independent from software functionality.

Flow

A central concept in the Toyota Production system is that work is carried out most efficiently if it flows through the team. It follows that this can't be done if every part of the process is running at 100% because, inevitable, the capacity of some parts of the chain will have higher capacity and some other parts of the chain will have lower capacity. The very first thing to do to improve flow through a team is to look at points along the production chain where work is building up.

In web development, this point is often testing. There are several ways of reducing this bottle neck:

* training up the whole team so that they can work in testing when there is work building up there.
* Abandoning testing as a separate function all together and relying on a comprehensive approach to Test Driven Development
* Pulling work through the system only at the rate that the lowest capacity section of the chain can deal with.

Kanban

I'm reluctant to use Japanese words when talking about Lean - as you see I've used very few - because one of my rules is that "Agile is not a license to speak Elvish or Klingon". Kanban simply ways of signalling what work needs doing and also of communicating to the team how they are performing.

Kanban is the system of signals that create flow of value through a team. One way of using a Kanban system is to create "pull" through the team so that work is only initiated when there is capacity further down the stream for it to be dealt with.

Continual Re-skilling

The rate at which required web-related skills change is extremely fast. In my experience with "old fashioned" software development there was a tendency for management to actually try to prevent its staff for from re-skilling (e.g. so that they would be available to work on COBOL projects, ADA projects, I've done them both). Now this would be an extremely dangerous thing to do - for both management and employees.

At the same time, the depth and variety of skills required means that it is very difficult for employees to acquire these skills "in their own time". One of the challenges of applying Lean to Web development is to figure out how to include continual improvement in the skills of the team into the web development process. It may be that this involves allowing some team members to work at less than full capacity (as the requirement for even flow through the process might dictate anyway) and expecting that the team members fill this time with re-skilling activities.

What is it?

One way of thinking about Taiichi Ohno - the inventor of the Toyota Production System - is that he was someone who really knew what a car factory was, what it was supposed to do, and how to make it do those things better. I'm not sure anybody knows what a web development team is (if there's only one kind of thing), what it's supposed to do, and how to make it better. I think this is really good news in some sense because people who can work this stuff out will be in a very competitive position - as are Toyota.

One of the areas we discussed here was that everybody I talked to in web development either doesn't know which bits make money, or knows that it is the bits other than bespoke web development.

Structure of "Building the Lean Web Development Team"

Session 1

Run through Lean Concepts

* Brief History of Lean and the Toyota Production System
* Value Streams, Waste and Flow
* How does Lean relate to web development

Session 2

Approaches to identifying the Value stream

Value stream mapping exercise

Session 3

Examples of Kanban use, in and out of software development

Benefits of Flow

Flow and Kanban exercise

Session 4

Open discussion

* Possible problems with adoption
* identification of next steps


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

Free (and Nearly Free) Stuff!

Agile Lab is giving away free stuff.

Here's the situation.  The more that I've read about Lean, Kanban and Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System, the more convinced I've become that there's a way of using these ideas to create a web development agency that would be massively more efficient and productive than most of the ones that I've seen, even ones that have adopted Agile methods as fully as they possibly can.

But my ideas aren't properly developed yet.  I'm reading everything I can about Lean and Kanban.  I'm talking to people who are doing this stuff inside their organisations. I'm listening carefully to the war stories of others who are trying to introduce Lean ideas.  Trouble is, experiences of Lean inside a web development agency are few and far between.  Most case studies seem to come exclusively from large organisations who are developing large stand-alone software projects albeit with some kind of web front-end.  Nobody seems to have done this yet with a 'typical' web development agency that builds lots of web sites that don't just involve software, but also combine design, marketing and PR.  This seems to me a great pity, because I think this might just be where Lean ideas could be most powerfully effective.

Over the two years that Agile Lab has been running, its area of expertise and focus has been on web development agencies.  I want to work with them to understand how Lean ideas can be made to work in a small web development agency that typically has several small projects on the go and short turn-around times.

I don't think anybody has successfully applied Lean, Kanban and other Toyota Production System methods to this kind of web development.

I want to be one of the first, and I want to get there in the most professional way possible.  For me, that means without using paying customers as guinea pigs. In order to do that, I'm prepared to give away considerable chunks of

FREE

yes, that's

FREE

consultancy, to any web development company that's prepared to come with me on this journey and allow me to use details of the experience as case study material.

What's in it for you?  You get to explore the way your company works.  You get the benefits that come with bringing in an outside consultant: someone who helps you step back from your day-to-day concerns and works with you to make your company the best it can be. You also get to experiment with the ideas that made Toyota the worlds biggest and most successful car company. Ideas that hold out the possibility of allowing you to "perfect" web development in the way they other companies like Porsche have used Lean to perfect car manufacture.

Oh - did I mention the course!  Gah! I can't believe I forgot about the course!  On the 14th October 2009 at the Watershed in Bristol I'll be running a workshop course on:

Lean Approaches to agency Web Development

The idea is that I talk through the basics concepts of a Lean approach: why anybody who does web development should take any notice of a car company? Then we'll do a bunch of workshop activities to explore these ideas, this will almost certainly include a value stream mapping exercise and an exercise to demonstrate the importance of even, continuous flow. Maybe some other stuff- not sure yet.

This course isn't FREE - but it is available to you for the stunning bargain price of £50 which will just about cover my expenses and make sure people turn up.

Contact me now if you're interested in signing up.

Especially if you bring along several members of your team

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

Courses being run by Women In Technology

Women in Technology very kindly list my courses on their site, so I'm returning the favour.

Upcoming Training Courses – September to November 2009

Putting your Strengths to Work

Date: Friday 25th September 2009

Time: 10am to 4pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £150 + VAT

Do you want to discover your strengths and find ways to put them to work for success at work? It is a fact that 8/10 people feel miscast in their roles and ONLY 20% feel they are able to do their best work everyday, despite the best efforts of companies and HR Teams - are you one of these people? Or, are you simply in a job that you enjoy but know that you could love it, if only...! We know that the most successful women are those who understand themselves and their strengths and because of this, they can develop strategies to meet the demands of their daily lives, their careers and their families.

The agenda will be designed to focus on you, your strengths and what you do best and will be highly interactive so you learn from each other and Helen and create an action plan for success in your current role as well as consider potential steps for securing your next role.

Once you have signed up to the workshop, you will be provided with a unique access code via email to complete the online StrengthsFinder assessment and find out what makes out stand out. Once you have completed the online assessment, you simply send your results to Helen (dogoodconsulting@hotmail.co.uk) to start your journey of discovery.

This experience may change the way you look at yourself and the world around you!

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/putting-your-strengths-to-work

Goal Setting in Times of Uncertainty

Date: Wednesday 7th October 2009

Time: 6pm to 9pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £57 + VAT (£65.55)

This workshop is for both people who are struggling to set goals (life, career, business) in these uncertain times, and people who have clear goals but wonder if they have to adjust them or if they need to be strong and determined. We will also help everyone who is in survival mode and has stopped having goals and dreams (except having a job and paying the mortgage, that is).

We will look at

• WHAT kind of goals can survive uncertain and challenging times and what kind of goals have to be revisited and corrected

• HOW goals can be revisited and re-valued without being too much influenced by the current mood and how goals can be adapted or replaced with something better. We will also cover how set goals make us perceive the situation around us and behave accordingly.

• WHY goals have to be revisited and re-valued even during “normal” times and why goals can actually can hold us back to see new opportunities in times of change.

• WHEN these re-valuations work best and when not to ditch your goals. When determination is only stubbornness and when it is the only way forward. When do I need to change my goal and the correct way of achieving it.

• WHERE you can find help and inspirations of successful goal setting and when “going with the flow” works better.

Benefits

You will learn about your personal preference and strengths in setting successful goals and get hand-on tools to use in times like these as well when everything works to plan.

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/goal-setting-in-times-of-change-and-uncertainty

Beyond Conflict - What's your conflict colour?

Date: Friday 16th October 2009

Time: 10am to 4pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £275 + VAT (£316.25)

There are ways to “have a nice conflict” conflict that improves interactions and gets results. Understanding how to manage and read the true motives behind conflict can be good for your IT career. Feel in control of your behaviour choices — both when things are going well and during conflict. This workshop will teach you to go beyond surface behaviour to identify the motivation behind behaviour. It becomes easier to accept a person’s actions when you understand what drives you from within.

Prior to attending the workshop you will be asked to fill in the SDI ®, Strength Deployment Inventory. The SDI ® is a powerful conflict management and relationship-building model and tool. In easy to remember vivid colours, you will learn how differences in relating styles represent individual strengths and how these differences might lead to conflict.

Workshop features include:

• Learning to resolve conflict early by understanding personal conflict style and that of others

• Gaining an understanding of your conflict style

• An opportunity to practice and develop your ability to prevent conflicts

• Understanding the dynamics in interpersonal relationships and what happens in conflict situations

• Practising ways of preventing conflict

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/beyond-conflict-whats-your-conflict-colour

Positive Politics for Powerful Female Leaders

Date: Thursday 22nd October 2009

Time: 6pm to 9pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £57 + VAT (£65.55)

What do you think of when you hear 'politics'? Machiavellian? Self-Serving? Or 'behind the scenes influencing efforts? Studies reveal that women place greater value on building relationships with people they like (whom they share something in common) over those that will promote their careers (strategic alliances around business issues). They also tend to focus on getting things done rather than on the larger strategic vision. And finally, the research shows that women tend toward perfectionism more than men do. They expect everyone to follow the formal rules, the plan or the official path to getting work done rather than the informal, blinding them to others’ agendas. These are our blind spots when it comes to being ‘politically savvy’.

During this training session you will learn 'The Rules of the Game' and how to be positively political to enhance their career development and satisfaction.

Rule #1: Like the lottery... you have to play to win

Learn how to ‘re-frame’ the concepts around politics so that you feel comfortable ‘playing the game’

Rule #2: Don’t get upset, get even.

Learn how to defuse any denial or resistance you might experience related to organisational politic

Rule #3 Treat Stakeholders as they would like to be treated

Understand two political power styles and how to flex your style more effectively

Rule #4 Be Yourself, but Be the Best Self You Can Be

Learn how to leverage your natural style to ensure you are ‘heard’ and supported

Rule #5 A Good Idea Alone is not Enough

Learn how to ‘message’ appropriately

Rule #6 Don’t light a candle to place it under a bushel basket.

Learn how to promote yourself and your team with decent boldness

Rule #7 Past Performance Predicts Future Behaviour….For Women!

Learn how to use your track record to tell stories about credibility and trustworthiness.

Rule #8 The world isn’t fair and the sooner you realize this, the better!

Learn how to ‘level the playing field’ by spending time on ‘the right things’ instead of ‘doing things right’.

Rule #9 There are Friends and there are Allies

Build your network strategically.

Rule #10 Only Powerful people Can Effect Powerful Change

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/Positive-Politics-for-Powerful-Female-Leaders

Proactively Polishing Your Profile to move Beyond the Boys’ Club

Date: Friday 30th October 2009

Time: 10am to 4.30pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £213 + VAT (This price includes a copy of the book 'Beyond the Boys Club').

The most successful women working in male-dominated fields know that you can't win the game if you're not willing to play the game. These same women understand that the best way to change the game - and make it work for them - is as a key player - not as an outsider. In this evening workshop, Beyond the Boys’ Club author and executive coach, Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris will take a interactive approach to look at how career progression, especially in male dominated fields, is a blend of aptitude and attitude, manoeuvrability, understanding office politics, coupled with self awareness and confidence. Women who get ahead are those who make key decision makers aware of their wins. When you work with men you have to learn how to play the game and get comfortable raising your profile the way they do. We need to learn how to play with the boys in order to move beyond the boys club. We should take the best of what they can teach us whilst maintaining a sense of our own integrity, individuality and independence.

This course will help you:

• Develop self-promotion skills to increase professional visibility.

• Identify strategies for career enhancement according to your values and current options.

• Improve ability to influence others and develop effective relationships.

• Increase visibility for achievements in ways that are individually authentic

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/proactively-polishing-your-profile

Style DNA for Women in IT

Date: (TBC)

Time: 6pm to 9pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £57 + VAT (£65.55)

Research has proved that “People do buy from people”. Enhance your career prospects by improving one of your strongest assets: the way you look, dress, hold yourself in the office.

This workshop will offer you a step-by-step guide to:

Making the right impact: communicating gravitas, confidence and reflecting your desired level of professionalism

Building awareness of subtle and subconscious influencing tools: gain understanding of the psychology of colour and how you can use it to complement your influencing objectives

Understanding your own, unique Style DNA: unlocking your personality, identifying your strong points and conveying those to clients, employees and other stakeholders.

This interactive workshop will help you avoid common styling slip-ups and ensure maximum influencing opportunities for you.

You will leave with:

• An understanding of your own personal Style DNA, and ultimately, your Personal Brand
• Insight into your own personal colour characteristics and how to utilise colour psychology to influence
• Tips for successful corporate attire
• Tricks to facilitate the casual dress dilemma from Business wear to Business Casual wear
• Confidence in implementing tricks to enable you to create memorable impact with clients and stakeholders

Please bring with you to the session:

• Your preferred item of office-wear (or the one that you get the most compliments
• when you wear it)
• Your favourite accessory (e.g. a scarf, a piece of jewellery, a handbag, pair of shoes,
• a belt etc.) that you wear to the office

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/style-dna-for-women-in-it

Building a Confident Brand

Date: Wednesday 25th November 2009

Time: 6pm to 9pm

Address: womenintechnology offices, 114 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JH

Cost: £57 + VAT (£65.55)

We all know people who think positively and act confidently even when the cards seem well and truly stacked against them. The individual personalities of these people will vary enormously – some will be quietly spoken and others the life and soul of every occasion. What characteristics do confident people share?

Are you intimated by senior or overly confident people?

Do you find yourself say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’?

Do you avoid putting yourself forward and miss out on opportunities?

The session will help you define your personal brand and build confidence in yourself. Tips and hints on how to take deliberate control of your behaviour, thoughts and emotions – your brand! The goal is to show you how this could have a huge impact on your self confidence and your reputation both in and out of work.

What are the workshop objectives?

• Building a personal image and confident brand
• Developing a personal brand plan.

Topics to be covered:

• Why you need a brand
• Big brand lessons
• What’s changing for you?
• Building your image
• Identifying your brand values
• Personal brand inventory
• What makes you different?
• Confidently marketing yourself
• Connecting with other
• CEO of Me Inc
• Personal brand plan

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/building-a-confident-brand

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

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)

Four great ways to Learn...

(...and one you might not like)

Learn from Somebody Dumber than You

"Every man I meet is in some way my superior." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We were in Athens (ah the joy of European Union Research Projects) and I was talking to some Polish guys. I was suggesting that before we start writing any software, we should go and do some "low-tech" activities with the school kids who were going to be the final users of our fantastic new technology. I'd say this guy was in his late forties - lets call him Marek. He was director of a medium-sized software company with maybe 50 employees. "What can a 10 year old teach me!" he snorted.

I told you there was going to be one that you didn't like, you can skip down the page if you want, but this is the interesting one. Hear me out. As you get older, you get smarter and smarter, and wiser and wiser. You get more and more skilled in whatever it is that you do. You get fancier and fancier titles - hey aren't you Chief Head General Technical Development Officer of Grand Vizier High Poo Bah right now? You're really important right? So, here's the problem. The higher up this mountain of achievement you get, the harder it is to find anybody "smarter" than you to teach you anything in your own field. All the books are for beginners, and the gurus? You went to college with the gurus, that guy stole your girlfriend, that woman's CTO of your chief competitor, she's not going to teach you anything. Do you see where this is leading? You're climbing a mountain of enlightenment, but you're also digging yourself a hole. The more and more senior you get, the fewer and fewer people can teach you anything in your direct field of expertise. But as if that isn't bad enough, the more and more senior you get the more and more danger there is of what Roger Fisher calls "status spillover" and I call "status creep."

Status creep is the insidious assumption that because you are very important you know everything there is to know about everything. And the more important you get in your organisation, the more the junior people around you will collude with you in this deluded opinion. In my opinion someone like Richard Dawkins is a status creep but that's a rant for another blog. In short it's the "What can a ten year old teach me?" attitude.


Richard Dawkins - stepping outside his area of expertise? (Picture courtesy of Torley)

Status creep is very dangerous because you can very quickly get to a point where you think that what you don't know isn't worth knowing. The question is, ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO LEARN FROM SOMEONE DUMBER THAN YOURSELF? The attitude that everyone can teach you something is an amazing one to have. If you can (at least every now and again) approach the world with this attitude, there's the possibility of carrying on learning until your final breath. Well, if you are, then that's where I come in. I'm not as smart as you are. I don't know everything there is to know about your business. I don't know everything there is to know about project management or even about Agile. I do know a bit about communicating Agile concepts. I do know a bit about putting people at their ease in training courses and giving them the opportunity to look at their work from a different point of view and improve their skills and techniques. I know which Agile concepts people have the most difficulty with (stories, velocity) and I know ways of easing them through these difficulties.

So, if you're down and troubled and you need a helping hand. You might sit down and ask yourself some of these questions.

• What can I learn from someone who earns half my salary?


• What can I learn from someone half or a even a third of my age?


• What can I learn from someone I don't like?


• What can I learn from the people who work for me?


• What can I learn from my boss, who's a complete idiot?


• or even... What could I learn from a trainer?

Those other four great methods of learning.

Read a Book

Books, audiobooks, DVDs and other "informational products", you don't have to read. You can listen to it or watch it on your iPod. Books etc. can be very informative. I hope I'm not telling you anything new here. Of course, theory is no substitute for practice, just a practice is no substitute for theory. I start on many new topics this way and sites like Amazon are great for suggested further reading. And - I know I shouldn't say this but it's true - bittorrent sites like Pirate Bay are great for checking out informational stuff, like audiobooks, especially for business and software development, (a representative of the FBI may call) before you actually buy.

Find Yoda

Find someone who knows it all in your field. An expert, a guru. This can be very good, but it can be harder than you think for several reasons. First, you've got to find your guru, of course, gurus are few and far between, so this might take more time and effort than you expected. Second, gurus are in great demand - a lot of people will have had the same idea that you've had - so the guru will probably have put some obstructions in the way to make it hard to get to him. Third, in order to get anything out of a guru, if there is something that he can teach you, YOU have to do lots of work. This guy is the guru. He's not going to go to the effort of spoon-feeding you all the basic concepts you need to get started. He's not going to bother with you at all if you haven't even got the basics. He's not going to go through everything he says and make sure that it's all on the "same page." Tim Ferris has written very convincingly about this in his book "The Four Hour Work Week."

Buddy Up

One of the quickest and most powerful ways to learn anything is to watch and listen somebody who is just slightly more advanced than you. If you know any small children who have a slightly older sister or brother you'll know what I'm talking about. This is one of the main advantages of pair programming.

Disadvantages? Could be that pretty soon, you know what they know and they know what you know. This shared vision and shared approach can be great, but if you don't have anybody in the team who's reading about new stuff, or questing for a guru, there's a risk that things can get stale.

Just Do It

Teach yourself. Don't read the manual. The world is full of self-taught writers, musicians, programmers and mathematicians. There are tremendous advantages to this approach. You don't know any better - so many great advances have been done because the people who were doing them didn't know that they weren't supposed to be able to do that. You can go at your own pace none of that feeling left behind or getting annoyed because you got it and others are still struggling. And you can follow your passion - you can do the things that you want to do. And there's an even more powerful advantage to this method because, when you do decide to use one of the other methods, learn from a guru, find a buddy, read a book, you'll be intimately acquainted with the problems and so really want to know the answers.


Paul McCartney - self-taught. (Photo courtesy of Slagheap)

Of course, there are some problems as well. Following your passion can also mean "avoiding the hard bits" and "avoiding the embarrassment of getting it wrong in public". I've written about this a bit here at "The Loneliness of the Self-Taught Programmer."

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)

Iterative Development

Mark talks about the process of iterative software development. This was filmed at our "Introduction to Agile Methods" training course that we did in Plymouth in January 2009.



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

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)

Two-day Digital Project Management Course in Central London

We're running a course on Digital Project Management at the Publishing Training Centre on the 23rd and 24th April 2009, the cost of the course is £880 + VAT.

The course takes in Agile Methods, but also covers conventional project management methods, as well as risk management, estimation, negotiation and other practical matters involved in managing a digital project. The course is aimed particularly at the publishing industry and at those people who are moving from managing conventional publishing projects to on-line and digital projects.

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)

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

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.

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)