This year I will only have a short presentation, announcing the XP2013 in Vienna.

I hope to see you at XP2012. You can still register at xp2012.org/register

Leading and Coaching People to take Responsibility and Demonstrate Ownership

I very much enjoyed it and so seemed all the other participants. The feedback was rather great. For example, Oana Juncu (Twitter: @ojuncu) wrote:

Just wanted to say thank you so much for the opportunities of useful insights that you offered us.
@Ralph : thanks for organizing the awesome venue!

I also had the chance to use this new insights in my practice when coaching people. A very valuable training. Thank you, Christopher, for such a great opportunity and for the fabulous cooperation.

Would you like people around you to take more responsibility and demonstrate ownership? Do you want to know how to support your team with that? Do you feel overwhelmed or angry when teammates avoid responsibility?

Would you like to know how to master responsibility in your life for any situation?

If so, then you might be interested in the workshop

“Leading and Coaching People to take Responsibility and Demonstrate Ownership”

with Dr. Christopher Avery on April 19^th, 2012, in Vienna.

Why should you participate in this highly interactive workshop?

• You will learn tools, activities and exercises to improve your ability to take and teach ownership behavior
• You will understand and can explain why and how some people avoid ownership and why and how others take it
• You gain a deeper understanding and can explain the connection between ownership behavior and success in any pursuit

Take responsibility and ownership of your own education and success and register today for this hands-on workshop

Register now

When: 19.4.2012, 9:00am
Where: Hilton Vienna, Am Stadtpark 1, 1030 Vienna, Austria
Fee:

• Early Bird: about 495 EUR (650 USD) until March 22^nd, 2012
• Normal: about 595 EUR (785 USD) after March 22^nd, 2012

We look forward to welcome you personally to this workshop.

Dr. Christopher Avery is a renowned international speaker and consultant for Responsible Leadership, Teamwork and Change. His bestseller “Teamwork is an Individual Skill” sets new standards for leaders. You can find more information about Dr. Avery on his Homepage.

Registered people can download our presentation. I like to thank all interested participants for their questions.

I prefer questions. So I decided to reformulate the statements into questions:

1. Have you ever used a similar product?
2. Were you ever annoyed by the limits of the existing product (competing or not)?
3. Do you understand more than the high level basics of the needed solution?
4. Can you answer almost every question regarding the product yourself?
5. Is your Product Backlog filled with horizontal and technical items?
6. Does feedback mostly come from stakeholders during Sprint Reviews?
7. Putting your foot down sounds like a feather hitting the floor?
8. Are you able to quickly and convincingly state the Vision of “your” product?
9. Do you call meeting after meeting and then a few more meetings with your development team when Mr. Stakeholder 2 overturned the request of Mr. Stakeholder 1, and then back again?
10. Do you have a budget?

Bonus :
Do you have that twinkle in your eye when you talk about “your” product?

If you are a Product Owner (or Product Manager), how did you answer the questions?

Agile Stories Project Ralph Miarka from Manoj Vadakkan on Vimeo.

On Saturday, Oct 27th, over 100 participants came to the Agile Tour Vienna at the FH Technikum Wien. The mood was great and the verbal feedback too.

I missed the keynote by Mitch Lacey as I was still at the registration desk for the late arrivals. We offered several tracks to choose from and, like at any other conference, it was difficult to decide where to go as all session sounded great. I found “Specification by Example” by Christian Hassa most valuable for me.

Katharina Fritz and I gave a session on “How to evolve from specialized individuals to a co-working team – an experience report from Agfa Healthcare“. We had several interested people in the room and we received many knowledgeable questions from the audience. I certainly had fun in the session. The material is also available via the Agile Tour Vienna website.

I look forward to the Agile Tour Vienna 2012

The workshop was focused on communication (obstacles, transparency and openness) and cooperation in IT projects, computer-supported communication as well as agile methods and characteristics of well-functioning teams. At the end of the workshop some participants were asked to comment on the importance of communication and the value the workshop provided. This is my comment:

I found the workshop very valuable and I look forward to further participating in the project.

Katharina Fritz (Agfa Healthcare) and I will present at the London Scrum Gathering. The title of our presentation is “How to Evolve From Specialized Individuals to a Co-Working Team: An Experience Report”. The following is a part of our submission:

During our Scrum transition we realized that without major changes we might not be able to finish our stories according to their priority and that work could be left undone when specialists drop out. We provide insights on how a group of people changed from specialized individuals to a collaborating team. We present initial worries, like: Does everyone have to know everything? We introduce a coaching system, its values, principles and practices. We show how the team charter played an important role and how the team evolved it. The team felt that motivation, collaboration and quality increased.

It can work to get away from specialists behaviour to team collaboration. We offer one approach that worked for us to overcome specialization towards collaboration. The audience can take away several ideas on how to approach one aspect of a transition to Scrum.

We look forward to meet you in London.

I’m now at the airport in SLC after a week packed with information and new people. First and foremost, I’d like to thank all the organizers for their support. It was fantastic. I hope the final glitch will be resolved soon and all material will be available for download.

Marc Bless and I run a workshop on Fear-Driven Impediments (handouts). The participants were great. They discussed a lot of issues around fear. We had two comments on improving the workshop: have a role play and give us more input on how to deal with fear.

I enjoyed talking to a lot of people and I also attended some sessions. The program was packed and it was difficult to decide where to go to. I liked the following sessions:

• Applying the lean startup model to the Enterprise: Jez Humble
• Making the Entire Organization Agile: Stephen Denning
• Narrative Coaching: Scott Dunn
• Design Thinking: Mary Poppendieck
• Continuous Delivery: Jez Humble
• Tests as a Means of Abstraction: Brian Marick, Michael Feathers
• Lean Startup: How Development Looks Different When You’re Changing the World: Abby Fichtner

Abby Fichtner’s sessions was clearly a highlight as it challenged so many assumptions on product development. In the context of Lean Startups Agile development needs to go a few steps further. For example, while most teams struggle with the “Definition of Done” as something being developed or deployed, for Lean Startups “Done” means that ideas have been validated by customers. Learning is key, not working software.

Mary Poppendieck’s stated in her session that user stories are already design decisions. It is more important to understand the problem a customer wants to solve. Also, Mary clarified that the Product Owner in Scum projects carries multiple roles depending on the complexity of the project. The PO can be a Software Designer, Systems Architect, Business Analyst, and much more. My conclusion was, that a PO needs to work in a team of people.

The keynotes by Barbara Fredrickson on Why Care about Positive Emotions? and by Linda Rising on The Power of an Agile Mindset were both informative and inspiring.

It was also interesting to see and meet many of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and to hear some of the background stories.

There were many talks, tutorials and workshop on coaching and fewer on the technical side of the Agile adoptions. I’m happy to see that Functional Programming becomes a topic for Agilists as I have a background in Haskell.

I look forward to apply some of the learnings in my work, to keep in touch with some of the participants and to meet them again, either next year at Agile2012, the Scrum Gathering in London October 2011, the XP2012 in Malmö or even at the XP2013 in Vienna.