Video BarCampGhent 2008

Also check out the BarCamGhent linkedin Group
This is the video from IBBT, I still did not finish mine.
I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net

Tags van Technorati: BarCamp,BarcampGent,Linkedin

XP Days France 2008 - Paris, je t’aime…

On Monday 05 may & Tuesday 06 may my father and I were in Paris. Instead of visiting this beautifully city we enjoyed the people from the French Agile community.
Although the organization before was rather chaotic, XPDay.FR 2008 itself was splendid.
The first thing I noticed when we arrived was the Job Board. Hey [...]

Linkedin group BarCamp Gent

I created a linkedin group for people that where available @BarCamp in Gent
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/102516/6A0E7F5279BF
 

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net
Tags van Technorati: BarCamp,BarcampGent,Linkedin

Ask for help…

Last week I rescued Christophe Thibaut in a mail. He was actually glad about the result. ( I proposed to use the 5 Why’s and the 9 boxes in an answer on a checkin of him.)
He replied with this general ask for help:
Ask for help : If you have some piece of advice in mind, [...]

Does your company work with external project managers/project leaders/Project coaches?

As a a freelance project coach, I am sometimes confronted with the fact that a company only wants to work with internal people. I’m trying to understand what is their motivation. To do that I asked these questions on linked in yesterday.
Does your company work with external project managers/project leaders/Project coaches? What are the advantages [...]

Leadership game / Jeu de direction accepted in Agile 2008 (Toronto)

I’ll check in.
I’m GLAD our leadership game got accepted for Agile 2008 in Toronto
I’m SAD my father can’t participate with me
I’m GLAD, I found a great replacement with Bernard Notarianni from Octo
I’m MAD, AFRAID as it will be the first session we’ll do together.
I’m AFRAID about shipping a lot of lego’s to Canada.
I’m SAD [...]

XP DAYS France in Paris

This year I am going again to XP Day Paris.
We have proposed three sessions, two of them have been accepted.
The communication game we did in Mechelen at XP Day Benelux.
The other was a brand new session about Self-organizing teams (See my talk about the Myth of Self-organizing teams)
At the same time the organization has moved [...]

Perfection game on Dutch Scrum Article

More and more companies are going agile. For a small company it is the best way to outperform your big competitors. For a big company it’s the cheapest way of working. (Some big companies have to much money to care about this.) Still I am happy that more and more companies ask me to teach [...]

Our first family meeting with a 5 year and a 3 year old.

As you can see in our family’s newyears video, breakfast at our place is always a “heroes happen here” event.
When my partner has breakfast with the kids alone: it works fine.
When I have breakfast with them it is ok too. The challenges start when we are both there.
We tend to have both our own way [...]

Shaping by means of successive approach

In most cases behavior what we want to learn to people (or pets) , is seldom behavior that spontaneously would appear. In that case it would be impossible to ratify when it occurs.
So what is a parent, team leader to do?
Well you can build the training in little steps.
Let’s look at how circus tamers do [...]

Giving positive feedback works best if you give it irregular…

I believe in giving positive feedback. While doing research for a big post that explains how to use these positive educational techniques with your (agile) team, I encountered this scientific fact:
Giving constant positive feedback works less good as positive feedback given at variable ratio or with a variable interval.
In fact people that are giving constant [...]

Building a house still a good metaphor for explaining building software the agile way

Last week I used the old building a house metaphor again during interview when I was asked to explain agile in 3 minutes to people who never heard of agile.
3 minutes is of course not enough so I will take some more time here.

Have you ever (re) build a house? Did you know up front [...]

War for talent: CheaperTalentHypothesis

I completely agree with Martin Fowler on this one. Better programmers out perform worse once. (And that is why they are cheaper in the end.)
It’s a very nice example of More is less.
Maybe one slightly change to his article: in an truely agile team, when the better programmers pair with the lesser ones, they will [...]

Reboot to team 2.0 is the perfect follow up after a CSM (Certified Scrum master class)

Sven followed a great CSM with Joseph Pelrine. (I have followed already multiple courses with Joseph. including my own CSM. I agree he is great.)
Svens next step is learning about self-organizing teams.
I have a few tips for Sven and every other CSM.
1) Check out my post about self organizing teams.
2) As I told you [...]

Deciding by E-mail

After the first European bootcamp, the booted team stayed in contact.
We tried to use the DECIDER in mail & skype and we noticed we needed to change it a little bit to adapt it to the different environment.
When  you decide in a meeting, you are all present and it is possible to show your decision [...]

international survey studying the effects of cooperation on work conditions, and discriminating agile teams/companies

I want to point you to an international survey studying the effects of
cooperation on work conditions, and discriminating agile teams/companies.
The results will be very interesting for the community, gaining some insight
on how cooperative really are agile teams (vs non agile organizations).
Dear Participant:
My name is Delphine ALLIN DOUILLARD, I am a Postgraduate student in Social Psychology, [...]

Agile & Prince2…

Recently I start to get more job offers like this:
You will be a PMI or PRINCE 2 certified Project Manager who has a strong track-record of working to a Agile process in software projects.

When I ask more explanations about the project, I usually found out that the team/company wants to work agile and someone else [...]

How to unsubscribe from PairCoaching.net mailing

Yesterday night I send out a mailing to promote the new agenda from PairCoaching.net.
So I got some requests from people that wanted to be unsubscribed.
When Koen designed the website, we paid a lot of attention to the unsubscribe feature.
So everytime when I  get such a mail I am surprised. I do take them serious. I [...]

PairCoaching book published

Technorati Tags: O’reilly,Books,Leadership
thanks to Clo for the information and the connection with O’Reilly

7 tips to compensate your agile team…

George Dinwiddie wrote about agile compensation yesterday. I agree with the idea’s he is writing about, I don’t agree with the link he points to. That compensation list is all about personal compensation. In fact some of them kill team momentum. So I wrote my own compensating tips.
A good team compensation:

is Value based
I think a [...]