Tobias Fors

Out of all the conferences out there, the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference is surely one of the most curious. Started in 2000 as a challenge (so he told me) from Jerry Weinberg (“so do you think you can do better”) to his protégés who were complaining about talking-heads conferences (“of course we can”), the AYE conference has been going strong for almost 10 years, and has garnered a loyal circle of attendees.

What stood out for me when I visited AYE for the first time in 2007, was how welcome I felt from day one. It was a stark contrast with a completely different gathering that I visited in Stockholm the year after. At the Stockholm gathering, I remember walking up to one of the hosts, and introducing myself. I explained that I worked for one of the companies sponsoring the conference. His reply was short: “Ok. Nice to meet you”. Then he turned around and walked away. I did not feel welcome.

Contrast this with the AYE approach. Before the conference begins proper, a pre-conference tutorial is arranged. Intended for first time visitors, this full day session not only works through the core topics of the conference, but also gives ample time for letting people get to know one another. The exercises used aren’t rocket science, which is probably why so many other conferences shun them - they seem almost silly. Participants show and tell their stories, and listen carefully to each other. It works wonders for relationships.

When the desert sun (AYE is held in Phoenix, Arizona) finally sets on the tutorial day, the conference is kicked off with a big outdoors welcoming dinner. A simple thing too, but very effective. People are seated around round tables of course, so you can really see each other.

Another seemingly minor detail stands out for me. AYE participants all create their own name tags, and carry them around their neck using a green strap. This means that, as you walk around the large hotel, which is flat rather than high, you constantly say hello to other participants (even those you don’t yet know very well) wearing the signature AYE neck strap.

If you haven’t tried it already, and you’re interested in the topics covered (teamwork, communication skills, leadership, change) give the AYE conference a chance next year. I’m sure I’ll be there again. And if you think this reads like a commercial, then so be it. Some things are just so good I feel I absolutely have to help sell them.

Reading a blog post by Tripp Babbitt reminded me of Ackoffs discussion on internal market economies in Re-Creating the Corporation.

Babbitt’s blog post talks about how focusing on cost reductions often increases costs. One reason is that cost reductions are often approached by centralizing services in organizations. When this happens, a feedback loop is broken. Those who produce the services are no longer those who consume them. This means that they loose their understanding of how well the services work. When the consumer of the service sees the service degrade, they cannot easily improve the service, because they don’t control the production of it. Instead, the consumers work with what they can control, which sometimes means reproducing the service locally, thus increasing total costs.

How can we use this insight to improve software development?

In software development, we sometimes see this phenomenon with centralized platform teams. A platform team is formed to develop shared functionality, to be used by teams that develop actual product features. In reality however, platform teams often have a hard time living up to the expectations of the feature teams. Because of this, feature teams sometimes choose to locally develop functionality that was supposed to go in the shared platform.

Another example that comes to mind is when organizations set up project management offices, and these offices proceed by pushing out standardized methods of work, instead of listening to the needs of the different areas of the corporation. Again, the idea here is to save money by standardizing, but the result is often frustration, because there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all way to manage projects.

One final example: the central database administration group. Created to gain control over database services, it soon becomes the bottleneck more than anything else, stopping projects dead in their tracks.

In Ackoff’s solution, departments within organizations should be free to procure the services they need from internal services and from anyone on the open market. If top management wants to override a department’s decision to procure externally they can do so, but will have to use their own budget to compensate for the losses the buying department suffers through this decision.

In other words, if a sales department is forced to procure their new IT support system from the internal IT department, even though they could have gotten the same solution for a cheaper price from an external provider, the overriding manager will have to compensate the sales department for the difference in cost.

Well, this is really a bit outside of my area of expertise, but interesting nonetheless. My learning goes on.

What are your experiences of centralized services? Good? Bad? Why?

I just came across a completely wonderful comment by Lisa Crispin, on Johanna Rothman’s blog. I’ve just read it, and already I love it. I can’t put my finger on why, but for some reason it makes me happy. It probably has to do with my fascination for the concept we used to call cyberspace (ever since I read MIT architecture professor Michael Benedikt’s “Cyberspace - First Steps” in 1994). The discussion on Johanna’s is regarding telecommuting, and Lisa shares a story of how she achieves virtual presence:

My team set up a rolling cart for each remote team member, with a laptop, webcam, Skype and mic. My webcam displays on the laptop, and my team members roll ‘me’ around to whoever I’m pairing with, or to meetings (rolling through the halls saying hi to people is fun!) I can control the webcam to look for people.

Det här är mina presentationsbilder från mitt blixttal på Agila Sverige 2009, som handlade om lärande, och hur vi kan använda förståelse för läroprocessen för att lära oss bättre tillsammans.

My talk at Öresund Agile yesterday went ok. I was slightly nervous before, as always. Once I started speaking, my 30 minutes flew by, though. Not clear on how relevant people thought my material was - we’ll see if some feedback drops in. My intention was to introduce a few useful concepts about learning to people in the agile community who hadn’t heard about them before. Embedded below are my slides, which may not be that useful if you weren’t at the conference, but that’s OK. If you were there, maybe they can serve as a small reminder of what I spoke about.

If you want to do some research on your own into the things I talked about, here are some links for further reading:

1. The Two Great Wastes
2. Origins of the “knowledge pyramid”
3. Ikujiro Nonaka on knowledge
4. Book tip regarding dialogue

I’ll be speaking at this year’s Öresund Agile conference. As at last year’s conference, I’m intimidated by being on the same program as veterans like Jeff Sutherland and Jim Coplien, but hey, I think I have something interesting to say. Plus, in a very un-Swedish way, I choose to focus on the two guys who came up to me at last year’s conference and said (guy number one), “your talk was the **curse word** best today”, and (guy number two) “your presentation skills are absolutely amazing”. Haha, of course, since I am a Swede, I cannot really believe either of them, but I’m working on that.

Here’s the elevator statement for my talk this year:

All organizations can use their potential better. Agile is one way to begin to do so. However, while agile has spread rapidly and resulted in many improvements, many still see it as just a new methodology. At the core of agile lies the belief in the value of being able to move with elegance and ease, even when circumstances change. This means that we can never stop learning about better ways to do things.
We can never stop and say that we found the one true way of doing things. Organizations that realize this use learning and teamwork to fuel improvments that go beyond what textbooks, industry gurus and competitors say and do. This is the true power of learning together.

Come to this Copehagen conference if you are in the Öresund area on May 13. You’ll also get to listen to experts like Mary Poppendieck and Henrik Kniberg!