Agile Coaches Gathering UK 2010
Last year, I missed the announcement, and therefore the Agile Coaches Gathering UK organised by Rachel Davies (author of Agile Coaching). Fortunately I happened to join twitter late last year and saw the announcement for this year’s gathering shortly after its announcement. I bought a ticket as soon as I could. It’s a good thing too since I think I bought one of the last few tickets for a restricted sixty person gathering.
This year’s gathering, held at historic Bletchley Park spanned a day and a half with Friday evening opening the Open Space format to be used on Saturday. Bletchley Park ended up an awesome venue, and the open space format worked well with a number of spaces located outside. Given the UK actually had a summer this year, it turned out very nicely.
One of my favourite things about this sort of gathering is getting a whole bunch of people working in many different environments, contexts and getting them to share ideas and approaches about what works for them. We had a mixture of experienced coaches and coaches new to the role yet there was something about being there on a Saturday and a passion for it that brought people together. What follows are my notes from each of the sessions.
Experiences from the coaching discipline (not just agile practices)
My first session of the day explored other coach’s experiences working or exploring what coaches from other disciplines do. One person shared their experience working with a swimming coach and how they helped them get better at their practice.
This theme, looking at other coaching disciplines to see what they do, definitely ran throughout the day although I’m cautious of taking the role too literally. We discussed this during this session as most people being coached (life coaching, sports coaching, etc) tend to do so on a voluntary basis. Working as agile coaches for organisations, not everyone is necessarily there on a voluntary basis.
Another aspect that, I think differs, is that most coaches aren’t necessarily experts in the field they’re coaching in. For instance, sports coaches are often not people who’ve been the most successful in the world. In my experiences, agile coaches are really there to act as shepherds to help people get the most out of thinking and working with agile practices. Unlike other coaches, this often requires a level of mastery than what most other coaches have in their field. I’ve seen coaches act dangerously with not enough experience with agile practices.
I still think there is value in looking outside of our discipline for ideas and methods of working, yet conscious of the appropriate context to use them in (and there is always a context).
Presentation is not facilitation
Tobias Mayer is really well known in the Scrum community, and proposed a session to rant about the way that most training is done. I think there are plenty of examples where Death by Powerpoint is interpreted as effective training and whilst I agree with the premise, I’m not sure I agree with the end conclusion. I think presentations have a place, just maybe not in training. I also don’t necessarily think that training is solely about trying to trigger a complete mindshift in people.
When a coach gives up
I met Xavier Quesada Allue at XP2009 and again at Agile2009 so was interested to hear the premise around is it okay for coaches to give up and when to give up. This was one of those sessions located in the sun and some interesting stories about dealing with difficult teams or organisations where it doesn’t make sense to try.
We didn’t attempt to clarify, at the start of this session, what giving up meant to everyone. This probably made it difficult to get an agreement about when or why to give up, although we heard some very interesting stories.
My take on this, is that coaches end up needing to prioritise their work, just like everyone else and thus, not everything is going to get taken care of at the same time. Working with people also means you cannot predict how quickly people will move, or how they will react, therefore there is no way that you can always set completely achievable goals (it relies on others, not just yourself to make them happen). As a result, as a coach, you need to be comfortable with things not always going as planned.
I think that coaches also have the benefit of seeing the system that is driving a lot of the behaviour for the people on teams and unless something is done with that, then they will continue to behave as they always have. Both of these take time.
Game sense approach (what I learned coaching rugby)
Another inter-disciplinary coaching session that I attended briefly although a very loud bus made it difficult to concentrate and I ended up leaving because I had difficulty participating during this session.
Double loop learning + Defensive routines
If you ever get a chance to listen to Benjamin Mitchell in a safe environment, he’s quite the riot. If anything, perhaps it’s his self-deprecating and admitting his own faults and looking back at mistakes amidst his jokes that makes it so warming.
During this session, he talked about a book he’d been reading discussing how people react, and talking about different “models” in which the author classified people and using that to be able to project behaviour in different circumstances.
Once again, Benjamin reminded me of some key points I’ve learned over the years like:
- What you say and what people hear are completely different
- Avoid positional or solutions-based negotiation. Lay your interests on the table and you’ll often end up in a better position.
I’m not really clear about what double loop learning is, so I’m going to have to add that to my to do list as well.
New books
Comments(2)Presented at Universite du Si
It’s almost three weeks ago I presented at USI2010 (Universite du SI). Organised wonderfully by the Octo consulting company, the conference’s tag line, “The Annual meeting of Geeks and Bosses” captures a really good essence. Mix over conferences and events are important to ensure that communities don’t silo themselves in ways that prohibit their growth. The complexity and chaos community clearly demonstrated the value of idea cross-pollination between between professions with their think tank, the Santa Fe Institute. This event is definitely the seeds of something good like this.
To add to the mix, I had the opportunity to present my session on Building the Next Generation of Technical Leaders here. This is the first conference I’ve been to where the majority of the session were not in English. This made me think a lot about how memes spread, and how quickly this affects how adaptable a community is.
I think it is wonderful for this conference to invite speakers from non-French speaking backgrounds, as I hope that it helped seed some more ideas into a community where translating text into a local language hinders the uptake of new ideas. I know that it is much more difficult for people to understand a language other than their native tongue and I can only admire those French people willing to strike up a conversation with me during the conference where my study of the French language is what tourist books teach.
The conference was very well run and although I would like to comment much more on the presentations since most of them were in French. If you understand French, and you find yourself near Paris, then I think it’s an excellent one to attend.
Downloading specific files through Maven
In ant, it’s pretty easy to use the ant task get to download something for you. Apparently it’s not something most maven users do (probably because they end up doing something like an ant=run). Even though maven has in-built web communications (this is how it often is found downloading the interweb), it wasn’t easy finding out how to download something not in a maven repository (without having to deploy artefacts into a maven repository which I understand is the “maven way”).
Anyway, after sometime, here’s the plugin configuration I used to do the download. Note that we’re using Maven 2.1.0 (and it could have changed in the latest version).
The following plugin will download configuration.jar and artifact.jar from the web directory http://host/pathToArtifact and drop it into a folder called target/downloadedFiles. This does this at the start of the maven lifecycle (note the phase it is attached to below).
<plugin> <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId> <artifactId>wagon-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.0-beta-3</version> <executions> <execution> <phase>validate</phase> <goals> <goal>download</goal> </goals> <configuration> <url>http://host/pathToArtifact</url> <includes> configuration.jar, artifact.jar </includes> <toDir>target/downloadedFiles</toDir> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin>
Some limitations is that it won’t fail if it can download some of the artifacts and not others.
Executable War in Maven
One of the many issues I had (have) with Maven is finding out how to use an appropriate plugin. The site documentation is normally pretty obscure, and examples are sparse. One of the activites we needed to do recently is to turn our war artifact into something that would run standalone. I’d normally use something like jetty for this but I didn’t find a way to easy bundle jetty and refer to the war within the same classpath (and still have things work).
Another tool I stumbled across was winstone (Hudson uses this beast). Wrapping this up seemed pretty easy enough. Note that the configuration below is used to start a war that won’t have dynamic JSP compilation. If you do, you can add a useJasper=true configuration and add the appropriate maven dependencies for jasper to ensure they’re available.
The result of this plugin will effectively build an executable jar, that you simply start up.
Need to add these dependencies:
Given that your project is a war package as well
<plugin> <groupId>net.sf.alchim</groupId> <artifactId>winstone-maven-plugin</artifactId> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>embed</goal> </goals> <phase>package</phase> </execution> </executions> <configuration> <filename>executableWebApplication.jar</filename> </configuration> </plugin>
You will find this artifact built in your standard target directly.