I've recently moved with my family to Ottawa, Canada. There were a slew of reasons for doing so but the principal ones were the amount of travel I was doing for work - which took me away from my ...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2009/05/goodbye-england-hello-canada.html
I've had a couple of experiences with introducing Agile on "our most important project", and they've been both a fascinating mix of a genuine desire to run the project differently (to avoid past ...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2007/07/our-most-important-project.html
I believe that software development is for the most part a social activity. This implies that in many circumstances the most valuable work that a coach can do is to improve the quality of interac...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2007/05/communication-communication.html
As a long-time advocate of retrospectives, one of the most rewarding parts of the teacher training course was seeing the idea of "learning from experience" in a different context. A large part of...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2008/04/learning-from-experience.html
As T.S. Eliot wrote : the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. I'm back at the code-face again: working as an Agile Coach with softw...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2007/03/arriving-back-at-beginning.html
After 14 years working as a software developer and with software development teams I've decided to try something completely different: I'm now training as a secondary school ICT teacher in the ...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2006/08/after-several-years-working-as-software.html
Having to work harder and act like 'robots', with little scope for personal initiative, are the chief reasons for declining job satisfaction in Britain, according to a new study . Feelings of ins...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/07/why-might-you-think-otherwise.html
A retronym is a word invented in the present to describe something that needed no definition in the past. (For example the "acoustic guitar" is a retronym that was only needed after the electric...
Story-telling is a long-established human activity with a rich and diverse history. Today the power of story-telling is applied in software development teams through retrospectives, appreciative...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/07/announcing-experiences-e-zine-for.html
The end of the conference featured Kent Beck, twice. First he joined a panel discussion on Leadership (summarised here by Steve Freeman, and from which I took away the strong conclusion that lea...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/wrapping-up-with-kent-at-xp2005.html
I heard good reports about this workshop when it was run at the 2004 XPDays and I wasn't disappointed at XP2005. Vera Peeters used the analogy of a group collaborating on a drawing to guide 8-p...
On Tuesday I co-facilitated two workshops, exploring Informative workspaces with Rachel Davies in the morning, and Teamwork and team working with Dave Hoover in the afternoon. The morning se...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/workshops-that-i-co-facilitated-at.html
Jutta Eckstein gave one of the invited talks at XP2005, reflecting on the change in her consulting experiences as Agile software development reaches out across the chasm to the early majority ....
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/agility-coming-of-age.html
And I'm at XP2005, unable to comfort him or offer support to my wife. The conference and all its attractions somehow seem less relevant right now, and my thoughts are elsewhere. Get well soon Luc...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/my-son-has-chicken-pox.html
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Marc Evers ran an interesting workshop based around the ideas in the book The Toyota Way (Author Jeffrey Liker, ISBN 0071392319 *). The attraction of studying Toyot...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/xp2005-toyota-way.html
Alan Francis was in prime ranting form at the bar here at XP2005 last night. He raged variously about baseball cricket, mock objects, people who use words without defining them, the differences ...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/must-control-raging-fist-of-death-he.html
noun: where students go to find paid programming jobs after they graduate from university (as defined by Werner Wild at XP2005)
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/industrial-wilderness.html
One man who certainly has courage and does communicate is Mike Hill (formerly at Anarchy Creek Software and now working at Industrial Logic Inc. ) I overheard him speaking to his tutorial group w...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/inspirational-coach.html
Diana Larsen's tutorial at XP2005 focussed on three important aspects of teamwork that are often overlooked: listening, decision making, and personal feedback. People can be dismissive of the ne...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/courage-to-communicate.html
I arrived at XP2005 yesterday to take advantage of the tutorial track that takes place before the "proper" conference gets under way, and I'm glad I did. Rick Mugridge's tutorial on Expressing b...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/expressing-business-rules.html
David Cooperrider, the founder of Appreciative Inquiry, identifies these three basic needs : To have a voice and be heard To be viewed as essential to the group To be seen as unique and exception...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/three-human-imperatives-universals.html
The first two days of the AI course I'm attending were a whistle-stop tour through the field using a mixture of practice and theory. This third day was different, much more of an examination of...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/appreciative-inquiry-course-day-three.html
I recently spent some time determining "provocative propositions" about software development teams as part of the Appreciative Inquiry course that I am attending. These statements reflect the be...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/some-provocative-propositions-for.html
As I write this I'm sitting outside in the sunshine on the south bank of the Thames . It's not one of my usual haunts, and this isn't one of my usual days: today I'm attending the first of five o...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/appreciating-and-inquiring.html
Dave Hoover is creating and collating Apprenticeship Patterns for software development. I don't want to discount the material gathered so far, it's just that I feel that something is missing. Th...
http://coachspot.blogspot.com/2005/06/excuse-me-while-i-feel-about-that-for.html