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AYE 2003 Conference Schedule
Sunday Nov 2, 2003 - Wednesday Nov 5, 2003
This is the preliminary (rev 2) conference schedule for 2003, correct as of 9/9/03. Please contact Becky and Don with changes.
Day Time 8am-1pm, 4-7pm 9am-5pm
Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, and Don Gray6 pm - 9 pm Monday 7 am - 8:15 am
Buffet Breakfast with old and new friends8:15 am - 8:25 am TRACK Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 8:30 am-11:30 am D12. Effective Habits in Software Development D02. Making Conscious Choices For Change D30. Making the Transition to Management D22. Why SLAs Fail, and What To Do So That Yours Succeed D24. 1 on 1 consulting with Hosts Jerry Weinberg Becky Winant,
Don GrayEsther Derby,
Johanna RothmanNaomi Karten 11:30 am -1:30 pm Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 1:30 pm-4:30 pm D15. Satir System Coaching D18. What does Agile/Adaptive Development Feel Like? D19. What Does It Take to Really improve Things Around Here? D05. Delivering Presentations with Confidence and Competence (Contributed Session) Jean McLendon Jim Highsmith,
Steve SmithJerry Weinberg,
PanelNaomi Karten,
Johanna RothmanBOFs, Dinner on your own or with others.... Tuesday 8:15 am - 8:25 am TRACK Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 8:30 am-11:30 am D10. Enhancing Your Personal Influence: From Novice to Maestro D27. Project Retrospectives D01. Exploring Tradeoffs: Quality versus Speed D08. Tools and Using Them Effectively D25. Interviewing With Ease Jerry Weinberg, Becky Winant Esther Derby Steve Smith,
Don GrayDwayne Phillips Johanna Rothman 11:30 am -1:30 pm TRACK Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 1:30pm-4:30pm D16. Satir System Coaching D11. Managing Team Membership: Who's in and who's out D14. Steering the System: Effective Interventions D21. Building Writing Skill and Confidence: A Writing Workshop (Contributed Session) Jean McLendon Steve Smith,
Becky WinantJerry Weinberg,
Don GrayNaomi Karten,
Johanna RothmanBOFs, Dinner on your own or with others.... Wednesday 8:15 am - 8:25 am TRACK Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 8:30 am-11:30 am D06. Increasing Your Effectiveness as a Change Agent D26. Predicting Project Completion D23.Levity, Laughter, and Lightheartedness: Humor During Serious Times D09. But I've Never Done Anything Like this before D17. Collaborative Decision Making Bob King, Don Gray Johanna Rothman Naomi Karten,
Diane GibsonDwayne Phillips Jim Highsmith 11:30 am -1:30 pm TRACK Personal Effectiveness Team Effectiveness Organizational Effectiveness Tools & Skills Assessing Your Effectiveness 1:30 pm -4:30 pm D28. Reflection Leading to Action D07. Project Planning in an Agile Environment D29. Software by the Numbers D10. Enhancing Your Personal Influence: From Novice to Maestro (repeat for those who couldn't make the first session) (Contributed Session) Esther Derby Johanna Rothman Don Gray,
Jeff McKenna,
Dave SmithJerry Weinberg, Becky Winant 4:45 pm-5:30 pm Closing, led by Naomi Karten
A final session where we will connect with friends and colleagues, reflect on our conference experience, have a few laughs, and say our au revoir's.All For all members of Jerry's Shape Forum, there's a free optional SHAPE day on Thursday.
Session Descriptions:
At the first AYE conference, some people commented that a pre-conference tutorial, introducing some of this material, might be useful not only to those who had not encountered it before, but also to those who had. Consequently, in 2001 & 2002 , we offered the "AYE Warm-Up" to make it easier for everyone to participate from a shared understanding of the basics. It was a big hit.
One thing that makes the AYE conference different is session design. At many conferences, the basic format is one or two presenters talking from the front of the room, to rows full of people seated in chairs. While there might be some of that at this conference, the emphasis is more on simulation and experience. We believe that this approach can be especially effective for this kind of learning, and we'll use it in this tutorial too. That means that you'll have a chance to participate in the session, determining what happens to a very great extent, and having a lot of fun doing it.
We'll introduce the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and several of the tools, techniques and concepts of Virginia Satir, possibly including items from this menu: triads, the five freedoms, the self-esteem tool kit, the communication stances, the change model, the interaction model, safety & feedback.
D12. Effective Habits in Software Development
We will learn from each other what habits help, and what habits hinder, good software development. We're not talking about "process" here, but personal practices.
We'll also look at how different habits fit for different people, and how various habits interact.
D02. Making Conscious Choices For Change
What one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended. - John Lilly, Mental model explorer
Imagine a disappointed child and harried parent at the grocery store. The child wails and screams. Perhaps this is just his way of expressing displeasure. However, the parent, unwilling to deal with what might become a "scene", acquiesces to the child. After a few events like this, a pattern forms, and eventually a model of "If I scream and yell, I get what I want." Now fast-forward 35 years, and imagine this child as the manager of a team whose project is late, buggy, and over budget. Any guesses how the manager might respond to the situation?
Mental models start being built when we're born, and are based on our personal experiences. These become our unconscious and virtually automatic behaviors. When a mental model is not "working", we might consider what changes might produce better outcomes.
In this session you will be examining your mental models, new opportunities for personal growth, healthier inter-personal relationships, and leverage for creating new realities.
Making the transition to management requires a shift in how you work. Here are just some of the skills a new manager needs:
* Managing the project portfolio
* Delivering effective feedback
* Organizing people, time and activities for success
* Managing up, down and across
* Effective one-on-ones
* Building and maintaining a team
* Speaking the language of the business
* Dealing with employee problemsIn this session, we'll select 2 issues of concern to the participants and explore those in depth.
D22. Why SLAs Fail, and What To Do So That Yours Succeed
A service level agreement is a highly effective tool for helping providers and customers manage expectations, clarify responsibilities, and objectively assess service effectiveness. But establishing an SLA is a complex undertaking that can create bigger problems than those it is trying to solve. To help you understand why so many SLAs fail and to help you improve your odds of success, I'm offering this consulting session. Bring your questions, issues, problems and curiosities concerning SLAs. We'll discuss them, and I'll offer advice, feedback and recommendations.
This session will draw from my more than a decade of experience providing SLA consulting and training internationally. For an SLA FAQ page, numerous articles on establishing SLAs, and an excerpt from my handbook, "How to Establish Service Level Agreements," see http://www.nkarten.com.
D24. Consulting One-on-One (or multiple people with common interests) with Hosts
Hosts not leading sessions are available for consulting. If you'd like some consulting with a host outside of a session, please talk to the host. These times are specifically available for consulting, but you may prefer a dinner or a breakfast or something else.
All of us are learners seeking to be more effective. Sometimes we need help. It can and has come to us from various directions: parents, friends, partners, clergy, therapists, consultants, supervisors, teachers, mentors, managers, owners, coaches etc. The form and quality of help available is equally wide ranging.
D18. What does Agile/Adaptive development feel like?
Lean, adaptive, or extreme excitement has assaulted the software development and project management world in the last few years because of the rise of agile methodologies. Whether you are fer 'em or agin 'em, the controversy has provided some nice sparks to the often boring field of methodology. While there are books, articles, and web pages (a movie is in the works with Richard Gere playing Kent Beck) describing these new methodologies, or ecosystems as I prefer to call them, experience is the best way to learn about the techniques and the underlying value system of agile development.
Participants will split into teams that each have a customer sub-group and a developer sub-group. And then, they will plunge through several iterations of a development project, gathering requirements, designing a ? (it's a secret), and regrouping. It's great fun -- bring your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your artistic talents!
D19. What Does It Take to Really Improve Things Around Here?
This will be a circulating panel discussion on the subject: What does it really take to improve things around here?
We've all seen things fail that we expected to succeed and things we had expected to fail succeed.
Does "around here?" mean AYE as well?
It definitely includes AYE, though "here" is intentionally ambiguous. It means, what does it take to improve things anywhere you might happen to be, especially when your expectations don't work out the first time, or first few times.
D05. Delivering Presentations with Confidence and Competence
Does the thought of giving presentations leave you cringing in fear, with sweaty palms and a squeaky voice? Are you able to present, but concerned that you can't communicate your ideas in a way that holds people's interest? Do you lack confidence in your material? Whatever your concerns, it's clear that your ability to deliver high-quality presentations to management, clients, colleagues, and others will help you advance in your career.
In this session, Johanna and Naomi, who have presented seminars and keynotes internationally to audiences of all sizes, will offer tips, techniques, and proven methods for improving your confidence and competence as a speaker. Whether you're a novice or a long-time speaker, you'll gain ideas for improving your presentation skills.
A new type of session premieres for AYE 2003! Individuals have told us they would like to offer one of their own sessions to AYE, so this year we have added "contributed sessions." We set aside one slot every day for participants to post an offering of their choice.
D10. Enhancing Your Personal Influence: From Novice to Maestro
"Man's spiritual creativity is not manifested by his philosophies, creeds, theological dogmas, or political systems, not in his wisdom, nor in his foolishness; it is manifested by the way he affects and transforms the world." - from the I Ching
Many of us hope to influence the world around us. In organizations, we propose projects and hope that they will be funded. In project teams, we advocate approaches and hope that they will be adopted. Each of us hopes to see our actions influence events to achieve a desired goal. Some of us call ourselves consultants and attempt to help others do this. Others of us do this and have titles that reflect organizational roles. In fact the consultant's skills belong to every effective person. This session is about amplifying our effectiveness in influencing the world around us. It explores our native and learned skills, and our individual strategies for fostering our personal evolution from novice to maestro.
Some people think of knowledge as information that is transferred into our minds in the classroom or through reading. Real knowledge, knowledge that teams can apply at work, isn't transferred, it's created.
How do teams create knowledge? One way is through retrospectives: structured, facilitated examination of a period of work - a 3-week iteration or an entire project. Retrospectives walk a team through the mental steps of reflection and integration to build new hypotheses on how to work more effectively.
In this session, we'll learn about retrospectives by doing a little project and then holding a retrospective.
D01. Exploring Tradeoffs: Quality versus Speed
We will explore the situation in which a product is designed and built to solve some problem. Parts of the product work as designed while other parts are defective. To improve the quality of the product, the defects must be removed, but if you spend too much time removing defects, your product will have little value in the market. You will be a member of a team whose job is to get a clean product to market quickly in order to beat your competition.
D08. Tools and Using Them Effectively
One way we can amplify our effectiveness is by using tools. We use tools in almost everything we do. Tools are so common that we often use them without knowing it. This session will examine tools and how we use them. The goal is to notice things about tools and their utility that we may have overlooked. Such awareness of tools may help us be more effective in our endeavors.
If you're like most technical people, you've never been trained to interview candidates. If you're lucky, you've learned a little about behavior-description questions, but not enough about auditions. In this session, Johanna will explain a variety of interview techniques, applicable to phone screens and in-person interviews for technical staff and managers alike, and then we'll practice them.
All of us are learners seeking to be more effective. Sometimes we need help. It can and has come to us from various directions: parents, friends, partners, clergy, therapists, consultants, supervisors, teachers, mentors, managers, owners, coaches etc. The form and quality of help available is equally wide ranging.
D11. Managing Team Membership: Who's in and Who's out
Feelings about who is included and who is excluded cut deep. Talk to anyone about exclusion and you will hear a personal story about a time when that person was not allowed to participate in an activity that they cherished. For instance, Steve would tell you a story about being cut from his junior high school basketball team. Heartbreaking.
Intense feelings triggered by bad experiences may cause a person to form survival rules about exclusion. A typical rule is “I must never exclude anyone (because they will get hurt like I did).” If a member of a team operates with this rule, especially if that member is a leader, the team will experience a lot of pain and anguish.
A vital task for a successful team is to extend membership to the right people and deny membership to the wrong people. This process is similar to cooking. Recipes specify the ingredients and process for mixing and cooking that will achieve the desired result. For instance, if you follow the recipe for creating a baguette but use pepper rather than salt, you will end up with something that may look like baguette but whose taste is all wrong. The same problem exists with teams -- if you add or persist with the wrong people, you will end up with a group of people who produces little or nothing rather than a team who produces the results you desire.
In this session, you will have the opportunity to be a member of a team. The team will work together to solve a series of problems. The solutions will cause each team to confront its members' survival rules about inclusion and exclusion.
D14. Steering the System: Effective Interventions
Have you ever wondered, "Why do bad things happen to good projects?" Maybe this has happened to you! Join us in this session where we'll share bad things that have happened to our good projects. Among other things, we'll consider:
* How do you effectively deal with systems that can do things you don't want them to?
* How do our interventions create the problems we're trying to avoid?
* Can we intervene in a system to keep it operating in an optimum range?
* What design considerations are involved in creating a system that doesn't require intervention?
D21. Building Writing Skill and Confidence: A Writing Workshop
Do you ever get stuck trying to put words on paper? Would you like writing to be more fun and less drudgery? Could your writing benefit by becoming livelier? Would you like to know some of the tricks and techniques used by experienced writers? Have you thought about writing as a way to build credibility and create name recognition? Whether you're interested in becoming more skilled in writing memos, reports, articles, books -- or email messages -- you'll get lots of tips, coaching and practice in this workshop given by wordmeisters Naomi and Johanna.
This workshop will offer ideas on what constitutes good writing, how to get past writer's block, techniques for critiquing your own writing, traps to avoid, editing do's and don'ts, ways to get the ideas to flow, and more. Whether you have yet to write your first complete sentence, or you are an experienced writer who wants to become better at critiquing your own work, this writing workshop is for you. Writing activities will be included, so bring paper, pen -- and your questions. Come prepared to take your writing to the next level.
D06. Increasing Your Effectiveness as a Change Agent
Methods and the Methodologies containing them exist to help us act profitably. Sometimes they take on a life of their own - perhaps over-shadowing their original purpose. In other cases, no thought is given to how to act profitably; any action will do.
In this session, we will explore methods for applying methods - a meta-method. What are some good rules of thumb to have handy to help us figure out an action makes sense and money? When should they be applied? Can we mix and match methods? How and when do we shift from one to another?
D26. Prediciting Project Completion
Many of us want to know when the project will be complete. And if you've ever read any of the project management books, you know that if you just plan it well, the project will happily fall into place. Yeah, right. If you've ever managed a project, you know that the schedule is the one way it won't happen.
However, there are several measurements you can take during a project, to more accurately predict the end of the project. If you'd like to experience a project and attempt to predict the end, this session is for you.
D23. Levity, Laughter, and Lightheartedness: Humor During Serious Times
In times of professional or personal stress, humor and a spirit of playfulness are more important than ever. This session will be a serious look at how we can use humor and laughter as coping mechanisms, productivity tools, relationship builders, and tension relievers.
But have no fear - this will NOT be a somber session. The prerequisite for attending is a willingness to be lighthearted and playful. While enjoying some chuckles, we'll discuss the seriously important role of humor in maintaining a balanced, healthy life and we'll explore how we can realistically use levity to enhance individual and team effectiveness. (Note: props, toys, gimmicks and gadgets are welcome, so bring them with you!)
D09. But I've Never Done Anything Like this before!
Imagine you are at work, and a person who you respect asks you to do something unexpected that is different from anything you have done before. The task is far outside your experiences. What is your response? Do you blurt out, "but I've never done anything like this before!" Do you say that to yourself? Are you still breathing?
This session will explore the feelings, thoughts, and actions that occur when confronted with an unusual or unexpected situation.
D17. Collaborative Decision Making
Some people view collaboration as an excuse for feel-good, time-consuming conversation. "Let's get on with the real work," they say. However, collaboration is the process of combining the efforts of 2 or more people to produce a result -- a module of computer code, a testing plan, a Boeing 747, or a musical score. And, whether we're working with one other person on a bit of code (pair-programming) or participating in a facilitated session with multiple customers trying to define requirements, the core of any collaborative effort is decisionmaking. Without a way to make decisions, collaboration does turn into conversation.
What kind of decisions will we need to make on this project? Who makes the decision? Who is involved in the decision? What criteria will we use to make the decision? What kind of decisionmaking process will we use?
This session will address these issues in three stages: Decision Framing; Decision Making, and Decision Retrospectives. Sam Kaner's work on collaborative decision making will provide the framework for group work sessions.
D07. Project Planning in an Agile Environment
Agile development methods are particularly useful when we don't know all the requirements, when requirements are apt to change, when we want to have something ready to ship at a moment's notice, and when we can't necessarily plan all of our projects in advance. Agile development makes it almost impossible to create a traditional project plan. And, traditional test planning is difficult to plan and manage in an agile environment. What does work to plan the project, plan the testing, and complete overall product testing, to provide information to the project team and to provide the customer the best possible product?
In this interactive presentation, we'll discuss techniques such as iterative project planning, pair planning, planning for pair testing, and exploratory testing singly and in pairs. We'll discuss the stresses agility puts on managers and on the technical staff, and explore ways to plan, manage, and monitor the work, and product risk. Come prepared to have fun.
There are many ways to measure in a project, and many ways to measure them. Possible measurements include both product parameters, process parameters, and people. We need to measure so that we can plan, track, and adjust. Yet measurement programs often fail to achieve their intended effect, frequently create new problems, and leave teams and people feeling poorly used.
This session explores the pitfalls of "objectively" measuring creative work. We will explore the balance between measuring people and measuring outcomes.
D28. Reflection Leading to Action
By the end of the AYE conference, your head may be bursting with new ideas and insights. Esther will facilitate a variation on a retrospective -- a personal introspection on your experiences and how you'll apply then when you get back home.
In the previous years, attendees have said, "This session was one of the highlights of the conference." At other conferences, closing sessions are a rehash of the conference, or a lessons-learned session. Instead, we work on helping people make connections -- with other attendees and with hosts, as well as the ideas presented at the conference. Our closing is a final session where we will connect with friends and colleagues, reflect on our conference experience, have a few laughs, and say our au revoir's.
If you'd like more information about the sessions, please go to our wiki page.
All AYE registrants past and present can contribute to the forum, and all others are free to read their many wonderful contributions. Many of the session participants (leaders and non-leaders) posted notes for the sessions on the wiki
We hope to see you at the conference.
This page was last updated 10/22/03. Comments to: webmaster@ayeconference.com