Release 7: my schedule for 2nd half of 2005

I am currently planned to go and participate to 2 events between now and the end of the year. These are:

• XP2005, in sheffield, UK.

I will Co-animate and run an XP Game session along with Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, Ivan Moore and Vera Peeters on June 21st, 2005. If you have not participated to one of these yet, I strongly advise you to come along. You will probably want to run one yourself for your teams or customers as soon as you get back to work.

I have also offered to Pascal and Vera some thoughts about an XP Game Level 2 concept, which would demonstrate other aspects of XP to participants and which are not explained in the usual XP Game. We have agreed to spend some time define what this Level 2 should look like. Hopefully, this should lead to another type of session for XP practitioners and project managers, focusing even more on Value Release Planning.

• Agile Business Conference 2005, in London, UK.

I will spend a bit of time talking about eXtreme Analysis and how this concept can be used within large Programmes to allow the Business to take better decisions, faster, on which projects to start. This will be time devoted to Business Value and Programme Decision making process, as opposed to XP proper.

My objective through this session would be to convince at least one organisation to give eXtreme Analysis a try for their Programme. ;-) If you are already interested, give a shout!

Release 7: Planning the unexpected... the XP way

I am currently reading the second installment of Takeshi Kovacs' adventures, "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan. Fantastic noir SF cyberpunk stuff, if you like this kind of thing. I must admit I did not pay that type of SF too much credit until I read "Altered Carbon", the first novel from Morgan. I am not hooked to the genre though, just to the author ;-)

Ok, why did I want to talk about this book. And why that title for this entry?

Well, Kovacs is an ex-Envoy corp member. These guys are trained to be excellent warriors and efficient killers. Their senses are enhanced and their mind is conditioned to coped with extraordinary situations which allow the Envoy corps to make split second decisions whatever life throws at them.

In this second book, Takeshi Kovacs remembers what he was told on his first training day to be come part of the Envoy: "Since it is logistically impossible to train you to deal with the unexpected, we will train you to not expect anything. This way, you will be ready for it!"

Now, in a subbtle way, that sentence resonated with me in terms of how XP approaches planning : there are two types of planning.

- plan for everything, including the unexpected (Waterfall)
- plan for the outcome, expecting nothing from the start (Agile?)

Waterfall will try and analyse everything, design everything, spec everything, document risks for everything, plan mitigation action for everything, action plans for everything. The problem we see with this nowadays is that the level of "unexpected" events (external and internal environment changes mainly) is increasing (both in number and frequency), and that to continue doing waterfall in this setup is harder and harder and requires more and more Knowledge people, trained in Change Management as opposed to Value delivery.

Agile on the other hand allows organisations to become ready for the unexpected. Agile is the equivalent of the Envoy Corps conditioning, at organisation level. "Since it is logistically impossible to plan budgets and resources for the unexpected events we will encounter in this Programme, we will train you to not expect anything. This way, the organisation will be ready for it".

Iteration 7: Planning Game

"I am reading a few books at the moment, and I am also gearing up for some events for the end of the year. I will talk about both these things in this iteration".

New stories:

Story ID: 7.1
Estimate: 5
Type: BAU
Status: Started
Value: 5

Description:

There are some books that I am reading at the moment that have content that might be of interest for the Agile community. I want to share some of the ideas they present on this blog so that a/ I can remember them in the future and b/ see if my perception of their possible relation with XP is shared with other people.

Acceptance criteria:

- The source of the concept is stated
- The concept is explained
- My thoughts are explained

Tasks:

- Do list of books/articles I am currently reading
- Retrieve quote/concept from each of them

Story ID: 7.2
Estimate: 5
Type: BAU
Status: Started
Value: 5

Description:

I am planned to go/participate to a few events. This is a good way for me to make sure that people who read this blog know where I will be so that maybe we can plan to have a chat there.

Acceptance criteria:

- Where and when I go is stated
- What I will do there is explained

Tasks:

- Do list of events I am planned to go to between now and end of the year
- Describe what I go there for
- Describe any other outcome I intend to achieve there

Iteration 6: Retrospective

Outcome:

I have created a few blogs about what delivered value for me during this training, which was basically what story 6.1 stated. I don;t think I have forgotten anything from what I want to remember, so I'd say the outcome of this iteration is pretty positive.

Writing this also brought me to realise that I wanted to learn a bit more about Ben Zander, so I went and get his book "The Art of Possibility", which I am currently reading. If there is anything in there that I do want to capture and share, I'll post a few more things here.

What worked well:

I had no problem coming up with some ideas for posts, which was good... It was also a nice change from some previous iterations ;-)

What did not work so well:

Nothing crosses my mind.

Puzzles:

I still wish I could find a bit more time to work on this blog....