Why we don’t have negative experience reports at agile conferences.

Last year at a number of agile conferences I had similar conversations were I wondered why we had so little negative experience reports at agile conferences.
I know that there are agile projects that are failing. I’m convinced that when you do an agile project, you will see problems earlier. Some companies might decide at that [...]

The Fun Factor

This video shows how you can change people’s behavior when you make them have fun.
 

I’m just back from Toronto where I did two workshops next to AgileTourToronto. Last day was AgileGameDay. A whole day of playing games to learn serious stuff.
The reasons for me behind these [...]

10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"

I have been talking about real life deployment at Flickr for a few years. People have been asking me numbers or places where they could verify what I said. Problem was I did not remember where I read that Flickr deployed every 3 hours.
Here are the slides.
[...]

Facilitating: the skill of multiple partiality

As an agile coach I do quite some retrospectives. My partner asked me a few days ago how it was possible that a team that did not know me, trusted me to do their retrospective.
What I told her was that it goes much better then when I do a retrospective for a team I’m [...]

Announcing courses in Toronto

After my successful sessions @ Agile2009 & AgileEE, I’m also doing a talk at some of the Agile Tour events:
Agile Tour Geneve (12 october) http://www.agiletour.org/fr/at2009_geneve.html Agile Tour Toronto (20 october) http://www.agiletour.org/fr/at2009_toronto.html Agile Tour Bordeaux (29 October) http://agiletour.org/fr/at2009_bordeaux.html
XP Days Benelux (23-24November – Benelux) [...]

The slides of my talk at AgileEE: Tips for creating a self-organizing team

 
As I had a problem with my timer, I skipped the video of Agile Hitler during my talk. For the people that saw my talk,it should have come before the slide with the responsibility of Christopher Avery. (I wanted people to realize they saw examples of the not taking responsibility in the video).
For the [...]

Apple’s view of the future as seen in the 8o’ties

At the Agile 2009 conference, Jared M. Spool used this video during his keynote.
It was how Apple envisioned the future in the 1980’s.

Jared said Apple used that video internally to take decisions.
Remember this was invisioned before the internet existed, even before cellphone’s.
I  am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project coach and you can reach me at [...]

Daniel Pink on intrinsic & extrinsic motivation

Esther Derby gave a great presentation @ Agile 2009 called Performance without Appraisals: what to do about performance reviews.
In this TED talk, Daniel Pink quote’s some research that proves why appraisals don’t work for Information Workers.

 
Vera Peters and myself gave a workshop in London on the same topic. You can find [...]

A new BootCamp is on it’s way

Almost a year after the last European BootCamp I’m organizing another one.
In my (obviously biased) opinion, BootCamp is the best way to learn how to create team’s.Jim & Michele McCarthy started doing Bootcamps when they left Microsoft, now 15 years ago.
The idea was to create a course were people would learn how to create a [...]

Agile conferences

To my big surprise I have not been blogging about the upcoming Agile conferences.
I’ll be going to Agile 2009 in Chicago. This is the agile conference to be. Neatly organized by different stages like festivals.
Unfortunately this year non of my sessions got accepted; Oh well leave’s me more time to follow other sessions and [...]

Fix price project in trouble…

Yesterday I receive this e-mail:
Dear friends,
Sorry to bother you, but I’m asking for your advice on the followingmatter.  My company is engaged in a project that is losing money.It’s a fixed-scope, fixed-money and we’ve badly underestimated theeffort required.  For the record, we started in May last year, and weestimated it would be over in a [...]

Rocks into Gold

If you don’t want to read the stry in PPT, you can order the book online: http://www.rocksintogold.com/ I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net

Our Team Compensation Workshop @ XP Day London.

After doing my presentation with Jef at Devoxx earlier this week, I was really looking forward to go at XPDay London.
Especially as Vera and I planned to do a session on
Team Motivation
vs
Individual Compensating Systems.
I’m working with both Jef & Vera at the Belgium Post.
Vera and I came up with this idea when we talked about [...]

Don’t gossip…

One of the things I have tried to do in all the companies I work for, is don’t talk about people not present. When I teached .NET I gave a lot of examples, sometimes examples of how things were done in a bad way at a previous client. When I gave these examples I made [...]

Project management, lessons learned from failed Project "Form government for Belgium"

You won’t find a lot of politics on this blog. On the day that Yves Leterme failed after 1 year to create a plan for his government, I want to use that as an example to talk about Project management.
In every project we have 4 variables:
Resources: the people
Time: The deadline when you have to deliver [...]

the most important coaching skill

Today I listened again in my car to Dr Stephen R Covey 8the habit.
He made me think about an article I read a few weeks ago in a major business magazine. In that article a woman talked about coaching. Not your average coaching but coaching of high potentials and CEO’s. She said  among other things [...]

Pictures from the Leadership Game @ the European Summer School On Agile programming

I have published our pictures from the European Summer School on Agile programming on flickr.
 

Euro BootCamp 3 is over…

This was my first BootCamp as a Certified BootCamp trainer. EuroBootCamp3 was a complete French BootCamp as all the participants came from French companies.

I will perfect the camp:
I give it a 9 out of 10.
What I like about it:
 

The team we ended with
My co-Trainers
The location
Steven From Koningsteen
The Core protocols
The Pictures we all took
The Integrity of [...]

It-failures: What I am doing about it

More IT projects are considered a failure then that are considered a success. We know that for a few decades now.It-professional published an article from Jan with the title it-failures what are we doing about it?
I’m personally convinced that not Technology but Communication is at the root cause of most of the failures.No Communication, Bad [...]

Dates next European BootCamp’s are set

The last year I have organized 3 open BootCamp in Europe and 2 closed bootcamp’s.
We have just set two new dates for more BootCamp’s to come:
From 5 till 10 October 2008
From 8 till 13 February 2009
Pricing:
Price for a full week everything included: € 3900.
Partners of people coming to BootCamp can join the same BootCamp for [...]