News from the Agile community:

XPDAY.be

XP.be and XP.nl have announced the program for the Benelux XP Days 2007 (see www.xpday.be)
Several PairCoaching trainers were selected to deliver trainings:
• “Whatchoo talking about” [Communication game] with Yves Hanoulle & Ignace Hanoulle
• XP Loops with Vera Peeters & Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
• Where does it hurt? Interviewing techniques to really understand your customer with Pascal Van Cauwenberghe & Bernard Vander Beken
• Frictions / creations What’s at stake with Incremental Design with Emmanuel Gaillot & Bernard Notarianni
• Security Architecture with Johan Peeters, Andre Marien, Maarten Van Hoorenbeek

Self organizing teams

There is a some discussion going on in the agile community around self-organizing teams & the leadership that goes with it. In our Leadership day (In its current format first played at XPday.be 2005) we let you play with different kinds of leadership styles, so you can decide yourself what best fits you and your team.

News from PairCoaching.net:

• Based on customer feedback we are now offering our Agile Kick Start course in open format. It's the perfect course to learn about agile concepts from Extreme Programming or scrum. Read more or order 28/03/2007
• Do you create MindMaps? We made a deal with Mindjet: our students get a free version of MindMapper Lite 7 (Value 79 euro)
• You no longer have to pay with paypal to enjoy the 1 month prepayment discount
• Rachel published an article on Agile Retrospectives in Methods and Tools
• I'm starting a 4 year Gestalt Therapy Course this weekend to become a better coach. 
• We have now added the last blog items to the trainers personal pages. We also added a list of our favorite books.

Team 2.0

, are you (or ) having trouble finding people? Why not optimize your current team?
In BootCamp (Aka Team 2.0) Jim and Michele McCarthy will learn your team how to perform at least 10% better. 

People who have been a the top, will work to be there again. 
Do you know Kim Clijsters? She is was a top 10 tennis player,  even without her coach. What made that possible? Her experience as a top 10 player with her coach.
I see the same thing happening with teams. People that have been in a self-organizing team, know how to bring their team to that higher level.
A leader that wants to create a self-organizing team must have been at least a member of such a team. BootCamp offers such an experience.
Jim & Michele left Microsoft 11 years ago to do nothing else but organizing bootcamps where they had teamwork laboratories. What they learned one week, they used the next. 
Most of us work with the same team for at least 2 or 3 years. That limits the number of teams we work with. Not so for the McCarthy’s. They worked with a few thousand people these 11 years. Based on that work they created The Core. The Core contains 11 Core Commitments and 11 Protocols. Although these protocols feel contra-intuitive, they help bringing a team to a higher level. 
When I read their book Software For your head, I loved the protocols, but I doubted if all of them could be used in real life. So I followed BootCamp in the States in 2005. I was amazed at the energy and the result oriented focus it gave me. (And I did already follow similar courses.) The only thing that comes close to leading groups is the one year VTLG. In bootcamp you also learn about results. You don’t find that back in other courses about softskills. 

Students stay the whole week in the beautifull Koningssteen, rooms are included in the price.

I am convinced that all teams that use these protocols, become 10 to 20% more productive. During a bootcamp people experience a self-organizing team, just as Kim, they will use that experience to create great results. 

That is why I asked Jim & Michele to give a bootcamp in Belgium and I will join for the second time. I am convinced I will learn a lot, even this second time. 

Read More or Order here:2007/11/04 2007/11/09

Looking for other courses?

Yves Hanoulle, Project-Coach
www.PairCoaching.net