Showing posts with label self-organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-organization. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2019

Mob Programming Conference 2019 - A Comeback

Remember my joy last year when I got invited to the Mob Programming Conference 2018 as a moberator for the first time? Imagine my joy when Woody Zuill invited me back again for this year's conference! Truth be told, I wholeheartedly hoped for this opportunity and booked my flights for the preceding TestBash Brighton accordingly, allowing me to fly to Boston shortly afterwards.

So, here I was, back in Boston, seeing so many lovely people again, and getting to know many more. It was a wonderful experience. Here's a glimpse into what happened.

Arriving

When I learned that Lennart Fridén would be back on board, I was super happy. We met last year and had some great conversations together, already on the very first evening. This time we could continue, meeting for dinner on the evening for the conference. A wonderful way to get into conference spirit!

The Conference

The first day was kicked off by the amazing Linda Rising with her keynote "Experiments: the Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful". It's always a pleasure to listen to Linda's thoughtful and inspiring talks! She's a real master on stage, and a huge role model as well.
Afterwards it was my time to facilitate a mob session. This year I chose the topic of "Mob Exploratory Testing", evolving a workshop I gave both for another company on my last year's Testing Tour, as well as my own company just recently as a cross-team, cross-role, cross-location mob. It went well and also triggered many new ideas how to improve my mob sessions further. Mission accomplished!
After lunch it was time for a  lean coffee session. I found myself helping out as facilitator at a table full of co-workers. That really made me think how to encourage people better to spread out and learn from other people's experiences. I get why we prefer to stick together, and yet it feels like a missed opportunity at conferences. On the other hand: this experience proved again why a lean coffee session still makes total sense to have in your own company as well. People came from different teams and learned a lot about each other's challenges and solutions they had no idea about before.

For the afternoon I chose the mob session hold by Chris Lucian from Hunter Industries, where the "original" mob evolved. He introduced us to the "Mob Programming Roleplaying Game - A Powerful Learning Experience". It was developed by Willem Larsen and all material can be found on GitHub for people to give it a try themselves. What I really liked about it: the purpose is to show good behaviors in a mob and thus level up your mobbing skills.

The second day started with a great keynote by Karin Tenelius: "Learning from Self-Managing Organizations". What an impressive journey she is on for a long time now! Karin gathered lots of data why self-managing organizations area win-win for everyone. By the way: I loved the fact that both keynotes were given by strong, knowledgeable, inspiring women. True role models, again.
Next up I chose the mob session by Colin Snyder: "When The Mob Encounters 'The New'". He jumped in as replacement for Lisa Crispin and Stephen Vance who unfortunately could not make it to the conference and were dearly missed. I liked Colin's idea of learning something new together as I used this topic myself several times for mob sessions so far. Our little mob ended up in doing first steps in Pearl by doing a coding kata together. Paying nicely into my #CodeConfident challenge! ;-)

After lunch I was very tired, so I spontaneously decided to skip the open space and instead talk with Andrea Zuill and Lennart. What a wonderful, re-energizing and inspiring conversation! One thing that stuck with me after talking with Andrea, who is a children's book author and illustrator: Sometimes it takes a ton of sketches to get a character right. So draw many sketches quickly without trying to improve any of them; instead, instantly move to the next one. If sketches are too refined, they are not sketches anymore ;-) Wise advice and applicable to other areas of life as well.

The last session I chose was Scott Ford's "Mob Programming with Legacy Code". He used the Gilded Rose refactoring kata translated to many different languages by Emily Bache. A wonderful exercise I got first introduced to by Maaret Pyhäjärvi's awesome talk at Selenium Conf India 2018. Alternatively, check out her blog post "Exploring Gilded Rose".

The Social Side of Conferences

I learn a lot from the content shared at conferences in talks and workshops. I learn even more when doing things hands-on together with other people. That's not everything, however. Often I take the most things away from the socializing opportunities offered by or evolving around conferences. Like the evening reception after the first day. Great conversations throughout the evening!
After the conference ended, many of us joined for dinner and the evening was full of inspiring talks as well.

That not being all, the day after the conference, Lennart accompanied me on my sightseeing tour through Boston. Loved it! By the way, in case you'd like to see photos from my conference travels, I've just recently started my own Instagram account. It's private as of now, yet feel free to request access.

To 2020!

The 2019 edition of the Mob Programming Conference came to an end. Yet there are already plans for next year being made! And we know one thing already. We need more moberators, meaning people who facilitate mob sessions, so we could offer more smaller ones to make the conference even more focused on hands-on practicing and learning with each other. If you have mob experience and would be up for facilitating, feel free to reach out to Woody! Or alternatively, Lennart. Or me, as it seems. Time will tell ;-)
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Thursday, July 6, 2017

About Crazy Days and Rope Bridges

On some days I fully focus on discovering the unknowns of our product, in close collaboration with my teammates striving to deliver value to our users.
And on some days I mainly work on company-wide topics like workshops, recruiting, or organizing meetups.
Some days are extraordinary, like going on a two-day offsite and building a rope bridge over a gorge. We had a team of talents coming from very different backgrounds who never worked together before. Still, we had fun, did a great job and learned a lot for our everyday work.

On some days I have so many tiny tasks and topics to follow-up on my desk that it's hard not to feel overwhelmed. Time just flies by.

On some days my team forms a spontaneous mob and I find myself learning a lot, but also contributing my perspective. On other days I work a lot in pairs in different constellations. Love those highly collaborative times.

On some days I hop from meeting to meeting having hardly time to follow-up on agreements, and finding myself wishing to not have accepted so many meetings in the beginning. But mostly they were important and valuable; and if not, we realized we have to make them so.

And on some days I extend the day to have dinner with my team or go to local meetups, to have a good time with awesome people and great conversations.

To be honest: I like the kind of days where I can fully focus on the task at hand the most, when I don't have to switch between too many contexts. But even though I plan for those days, I learned that plans are just plans and reality might be different. But that this is totally fine as long as I work on topics that provide value. Even better if I work on those that provide the highest value first.

Within the last three weeks I encountered all kind of days described above. Some have been crazier than others, but none of them were wasted. I have the freedom to decide myself on what to work on. So for me, it's about finding the right balance of how to use my time to achieve the best overall outcome, trying to do less in order to focus on what actually provides value.

Sometimes I excel at the right balance. Sometimes I fail miserably. As long as I learn something every day so I can improve myself and my surroundings, I'm fine. Every day is different, but never boring.
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Thursday, June 1, 2017

Select Your Team

May 16, 2017 was a day to remember at my company. All the people of our FlixTech organization came together for a huge event. All our products were pitched by their owners. And then every single one was free to chose their product, their team, their role, and their location - from now on.

Beginning of the year, I have come across the following reports of such team self-design events.
After reading about this approach of giving the people the freedom to choose their own future and actively encouraging them to do so, I was both curious and excited to experience it myself. In order to learn how we facilitated our event in a nutshell, check out Day 0 by my colleague Alex. What I want to focus on in this post is my personal view on how people responded to the event announcement and on the days after.

Freedom and trust...?

As soon as our company signalled that we would redesign our domains and products, but also have all our people redesign our teams around those products, people began to raise questions and express worries.
  • "What if the team I want to work on is already full?"
  • "What if it's decided my team is now located in a different city than I live in, but I don't want to relocate?"
  • "What if the budget of my team is reduced so at least one former member has to leave the team?"
  • "I was just hired for this team a month ago, what happens to me?" 
  • "What about people on vacation, on sick leave, or stuck in a traffic jam on that day?"
  • "What about my salary if I change my role?"
  • "Oh this whole self-selection thing is just fake, management will maintain control, they won't put that much trust in people."
You can imagine how this list went on. In the end, I'm really happy that our concerns vanished into thin air. Our board and management actually did put a lot of trust in our people, our CIO ahead of everyone. And the people did take it as an opportunity. After three iterations of trying to find the right team setups, every team member was happy with their choice, just as management and the board. We identified only two teams for which we needed to hire people having the missing skills. The other teams could also use support, but were already able to deliver value. Overall, everything worked out way better than we even hoped for. We were exhausted - but enthusiastic about our new teams, ready to celebrate and kick it off.

What now?

That wasn't it. After the event was before our so-called ignition period. Several products had been re-designed or even freshly added. Some teams were starting from scratch. Some teams split into two. Previously existing teams ended up with different members. Some people changed their role. It was obvious that we needed to consider a certain transformation period and invest in team liftoffs, as Diana Larsen puts it (check out her Agile Testing Days 2017 keynote to learn more).

Personally, I decided to stay with my former team, just like most of my teammates. However, we lost one of us to another team and did not get any new member. Still, we changed. So we decide to take this opportunity to form our team from scratch, to "re-ignite" it.

Right after the event, it was pretty hard not to fall back into old habits and just continue with "business as usual". We knew each other already, had all skills covered in the team, and could simply pick up the next backlog items to work on. On the third day after the event, we finally forced ourselves to pause for a moment.
  • To learn more about our team and uncover what's hidden, we created a team canvas together. This workshop format helped a lot to share our thoughts, our values, our goals, what moves us, who we are - to find our own new team identity. We decided on what we want to achieve together as well as new working agreements.
  • We moved to another room and took this chance to change our seating layout. We wanted to make it obvious that the team actually changed. To try something new. To get rid of table islands, foster team spirit and hopefully ease communication and even closer collaboration.
  • We heavily brainstormed to select a new team name, logo, slogan, theme song, and more. This way, we learned a lot about us on a personal level which brought us a step closer together. We were surprised how hard it was to find something from popular culture that we all shared and loved, as we're quite diverse in any aspect.
It's been only two weeks since the redesign event. However, I feel we now laid the groundwork for our new identity. I have the impression our team feels revived and shows fresh energy. And I hope we can keep it up to achieve our common goals and continuously improve as a team.
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