Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Posted by Amr Elssamadisy on Aug 04, 2008
Agile 2008 officially starts today, August 4, 2008. However, over the weekend this reporter and others from the Agile community attended coaching training that focused on organization and relationship systems coaching (this class was attended by coaches in IT, health care, mediation, and life-coaching). This type of coaching focuses not only the individuals but the relationship between individuals as its own entity. The theory can be applied to both individual and team coaching.
The term "coach" in the Agile community can mean different things to different people such as mentor/advisor, team lead, project manager, or even consultant. In the broader coaching world, they have a distinction - and that is a coach's job is not to "fix" the system but to reveal the system to itself. The theory is that change can only come from within. Furthermore, that every system is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole - even if the system is dying, that is ok.
This definition of a coach, and the system that she is coaching maybe uncomfortable with many of us in the field. However, being at a conference is an opportunity to check new theories quickly with some very experienced practitioners. (Surprisingly?) This view of a coach's role and how to successfully bring about change in an organization is not alien to many of the more experienced attendees in the conference. Four different experienced coaches and practitioners validated this view of a coach's role and responsibility to the team or organization they are coaching.
Design in Agile, Software Craftsmanship, Product Development, Testing @ QCon London in March
The 5 Mandates of Software Development Teams - Presto Manifesto
VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.
You can read more here: International Coach Federation competencies and The Coaches Training Institute, for starters.
One of the very interesting lessons I learned from TOC (Theory of Constraints) is that subtle detail of "causing" the change instead of "making" the change.
From coaching with several organizations for years I understand that this little concept is paramount to being effective at introducing lasting organizational change.
Whenever I tried to make a change on a system, a team in this case, I obtained rapid response sometimes in the direction that I wanted, sometimes in the opposite direction, I was in control of the "change", but change didn't lasted, so to maintain that I needed to put effort to maintain it, this can't be called change, it was just a reaction.
But when I reflected as a mirror the system to itself, I had sometimes no rapid response, but after a couple of times patiently doing that suddenly change happened not as a reaction that will end as soon as I stopped putting effort on making the change.
This I think is related to the concept of trying to change what we do, to obtain what we want, instead we need to change what we are that will effortlessly change what we do, and lead to the results that we want.
It's the paradigm, baby!
Juan.
www.teamware.com.br
Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).
The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?
The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.
"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?
Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.
SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.
Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.
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