- What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I've worked as CTO at 3 Swedish IT companies over the last 10 years and unwittingly used all three as victims of my interest in experimenting with software development processes. I discovered XP around 2000 and Scrum a few years later, and have been blessed with ample opportunities to coach and lead teams towards being agile. Some of these experiences are documented in my book "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" and my blog.
During the past year I've focused on helping companies with the actual transitioning process and tried to learn as many patterns and tricks for this as possible. Also done some talking at various conferences. I now co-train and co-coach with Jeff Sutherland on a regular basis, which is very educational!
Somehow I keep finding myself in situations where a project or company is exploding, and where agile techniques are exactly what they need right now to get out of the mess.
- What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I'm quite comfortable with leading and participating in agile projects. But lately I've started working more and more as "outside" coach, helping companies get agile and then coming back once in a while to follow up. I also do more and more "coach the coach" type jobs. These roles are still outside my comfort zone, great fun but I feel like I'm on thin ice all the time. So I hope to pick up some tips and tricks from other people experienced with that type of role.
I'm also interested in the actual transitioning process. Where to start. Common patterns and mistakes. How to deal with various types of resistance. When to push and when to back off. How to set goals for the transitioning process itself, and how to follow these up. How to foster self organization & self-learning organizations.
When training and coaching there are some types of questions that keep coming up. I'd like to compare notes with other teachers & coaches, check if they get the same questions and how they deal with them.
- How do you plan to contribute?
I can probably contribute with some experiences on how to help small to midsized companies take the first steps towards going agile, and some patterns for dealing with the most common types of problems (such as technical debt) and patterns for doing agile training sessions. Some of these are in my book, some are on my blog, some are new.
I'm interested in pretty much all aspects of agile coaching & development. So I'll probably be both contributing and learning regardless of which topics come up.