Passionate about your development

The Agile Tour Vienna 2012 took place on November 24th, 2012. I enjoyed the busy atmosphere and to meet so many people from the agile community in Vienna. The keynote by Jutta Eckstein provided some food for thought.

We offered a workshop on Solution Focused Retrospectives. We worked through some Goal Setting, Appreciation, Coaching Questions, the Principles from Solution Focus and Scaling as a tool. Our slides from our workshop are now available.

We like to thank the participants. Here is what they had to say about the workshop:

Excellent introduction and very useful tips and techniques to take home. Always a pleasure working with Ralph!

gut strukturiert und gute Inputs für die retrospektive

Great workshop! Good ideas I will definitely experiment with.

Hilfreiche sofort umsetzbare Techniken um erfolgreich mit Teams zu
arbeiten und sie dabei zu unterstützen, in wertschätzender Art und
Weise miteinander zu kommunizieren. Hätte gerne länger dauern
dürfen.

Outstanding, especially the group practice sessions.

wasn’t really focused on retrospectives

Rather soon I will travel to Malmö to attend the XP2012 conference. The program is packed with interesting talks and presentations. I look very much forward to it.

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

On April 19th, Christopher Avery provided his training on

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.

“Leading and Coaching People to take Responsibility and Demonstrate Ownership”- an exceptional workshop with Dr. Christopher Avery on April 19th, 2012, in Vienna, Austria

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.

My former colleague Eva Kisonova and I presented at the Software Quality Days in Vienna about our work towards an agile systems development methodology (agileSEM) for Siemens CEE. This work aimed at supporting the organization to make sense of the new development approach and to support teams that wanted to become agile and feared restrictions by all the Siemens regulations. We are confident that our group of involved people provided a helpful guideline for the teams on how to apply agile principle, values and practices in their daily work. Feedback by the teams show that they used and valued agileSEM. Even CMMI assessors think it helps to increase quality and company learning though some assessors believe that more processes need to be documented.

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

A while ago I read the blog post Top 10 signs you are a Product Clerk and not a Product Owner. The author Eric Laramée postulates ten signs that tell whether a Product Owner is more like a Product Clerk.

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

iCom is a cooperative EU-project between the Vienna University and the Masaryk University in Brno to promote and research constructive, international communication in the context of Information- and Communication Technology (ICT). On September 26-27th I was invited to join the 3rd iCom workshop in Chvalovice.

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.