At LESS 2011, the organizers ditched the standard forms and went with simple post-its for feedback.

Instead of answering multiple questions, all you had to do is to grab a post it (available in all chairs) and stick it on the right place on the door when leaving (picture below). If you had anything more to say, you could write it in the actual post it, which were then delivered as they were written to the presenters.

   That’s it! Simple and effective.

Here are some examples of the results. I’m sure I could get better at it but the fact that I’m able to look a t it 2 months later and still remember what was presented says to me I’m on the right track.

Apart from that, the act of recording and try to create an explanation of what is being said makes me pay much more attention on the content. And it also helps me perceive when Im actually not understanding what is being said (or it is actually too hard to understand..), which happened a couple of times during the conference, as you can see from this example.

As any presentation write-up, this is just my understanding about what was presented, so please don’t hold the presenter on to what I’m writing here :)

Why ?

The first question Bjarte addressed was why the need for something different. And I believe this sentence explains it all

January-December is artificial for business and just works for accounting. But this is not accounting

He followed by explaining that StatOil is always trying to get the best performance they can (who isn’t!), and coupling everything they do to an accounting mechanism (the budget) doesn’t make sense for them. He illustrated it with a comparison between the use of traffic lights and roundabouts. While the first is easier to use and provides more control, the latter actually provides better results because it relies more in the current situation than on statistical analysis.

We need to find more self regulating ways to manage a business, and beyond budgeting is one of them.

Bjarte used Douglas McGregor’s Theories X and Y to explain how we traditional management doesn’t usually trust people and relies on a stable environment to succeed, but in a dynamic environment in which most companies are inserted today, we need to start trusting our employees much more, and that is where beyond budgeting stands.

He had a nice example to show the lack of trust some companies impose, about a friend who is a SAS pilot, and even when he is trusted to fly planes full of people around, if he wants to change his shirt more often than it’s stated in the company’s policy, he needs a written authorization for it.

How does it work ?

According to Bjartes, the problem with budget is that it’s a single tool used for three separate purposes: Setting targets, creating forecats and allocating resources. Since these results are usually different from each other (targets are what we want, forecasts are what we expect to get), we won’t get an optimal result from using it.

In StatOil they have developed an alternative format of planning called Ambition to Action. These are a few principles that are used when cdefining it:

• Good performance is being better than those we compare ourselves with
• It could be external companies or even ourselves, which means we are learning.
• Do the right thing
• Every new joiner receives a StatOil book (a thin one!) with some of the principles that guide the company, so they can all use their business judgement and make decisions when needed.
• Resources are made available and allocated on a case by case basis
• Bjartes compared having an yearly budget to having a bank that opens for only a month throughout the year. How can anyone make timely decisions with that ?
• Business is forward looking and action oriented
• Performance measurement is holistic, and composed by 50% results and 50% behaviour

These principles are used to define what to do in the company, in a process that goes like this:

1. Strategic Objectives -> 2. KPI’s -> 3. Action & Forecast -> 4.Individual goals

So the company is going to set strategic objectives which are then converted in KPI’s. These are used to define the things that need to be done (Ambition to action), which reflect on how performance is measured for everyone in the company.

Some interesting thoughts he shared when explaining the process were:

• The perfect KPI doesn’t exist, since not everything that counts can be counted.
• StatOil creates around 1100 Ambition to action plans, and these are not a reporting tool, but more a guidance on how you as an employee should manage him/herself. Apart from that, everything is open, so everyone can see everyone’s else goals.
• Performance measurement is usually based on teams and, as said before, divided between results and behaviour. Assuming that the environment very often changes, how someone behaved in that occasion is as important as the results he/she delivered.

The last point that was made during the presentation is how StatOil is moving from a calendar-driven model to a business-driven one. There are no more annual versions of Ambition to Action being created, and they can be changed at any time. The performance review is still happening annually, but Bjartes mentioned they are currently revisiting it now.

Overall it was a great introduction to Beyond Budgeting and how it is applied at StatOil. If you are interested, there is more information here and here.

Bjartes is speaking in the Thoughtworks Live Australia event. If you have a chance to go, don’t miss it.

Our team is quite small (around 9 people) and Im sure a lot of what we have done would be impossible to do in a larger team (I guess the next question would be why do you have a larger team.. :P), however just wanted to share the tools used and how it was all done.

Since we use skype for video communication, sharing a whiteboard would be impossible. The simplest solution found was TypeWith.me, an online collaboration tool that we projected on the wall.

We started by having everyone spending some time writing their ideas/observations on post its, but then instead of attaching them to the wall, we went around the table and everyone dictated their concerns, that were scribed in on TypeWith.me. After sharing ideas we went around again and everyone voted on ideas, which were noted on the online document again. Some reshuffling was done on them based on votes, and the we continued with the standard retro time-boxed discussions.

In general, I believe the retro had a good outcome. We didn’t lose too much time with the communication overhead and having the topics projected on the wall made it clear enough to both sides what was being discussed. Not trying to claim this was revolutionary in any sense, but if you are interested in running a small distributed retro, this might solve your problem.

 We want to make this process better!

so for some time we had thought it creating a similar game focused only in continuous improvement, which would allow attendees to learn about improvement principles and practices while having some fun with Lego bricks : )

This idea has turned into reality in the format of the Kaizen Lego Game, which was presented for the first time at Agile 2011 in SaltLake City, earlier this year. Unfortunately Danilo couldn’t make it, but I was lucky enough to have Pat Kua as the substitute, helping me a lot with all the work involved in it.

Keeping the same format as the original one, the idea behind this workshop was to create an immersive environment where we could introduce continuous improvement principles and practices while improving a small Lego production line. Amongst the topics we focused during the workshop were:

•  Kaizen
• Value Stream Mapping
• Inventory
• Waste
• Standards & Improvement
• Cycle Time
• 5 Whys
• Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)

I was quite pleased with the result for the first time we presented it. The attendance was very good and we had great positive feedback (and also suggestions for improvements, which were great!).

Want to run it yourself ?

As with the Lean Lego Game, all the material to run the workshop is available through a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license. If you are interested, feel free to run and adapt it, as long as we get given the appropriate credit and that you don’t use it for commercial purposes. We also would appreciate receiving some feedback on how it worked out for you.

We have created a package containing all you need to try it out in your environment, including:

•  Facilitator’s Guide: instructions on how to run the workshop
• Print material: instructions for participants and worksheets using during the activity
• Slides

Just get in touch via email to request it!

Kaizen Lego Game by Francisco Trindade & Danilo Sato is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported License.

In August this year (I know, a long time ago…) I had the opportunity to be in Salt Lake City for the Agile 2011 conference. It  was the  second Agile conference in the US I’ve attended, and I have to say Im quite pleased with the results.

The venue itself was very appropriate for the event, using two hotels just across the street from each other. Despite having session rooms spread in a large area, it was easy to move between them and there was lots of options of place for sitting down between sessions and talk with other participants, which is always one of my favourite parts in a conference. The Open Jam space was one of the great points for me, with lots of people hanging out there at any given time.

As the biggest conference I’ve ever been, the number of sessions was quite overwhelming. Having to choose one between 18 tracks is always hard, giving you a constant feeling of missing out. It’s one of the good problems to have though, and the quality of the sessions was very good, including two great keynotes. I will be writing up about the sessions I’ve attended soon and also about the one I’ve presented (watch this space).

In general, besides listening to great new ideas, going to conferences like this always works as a refresher for me. It’s good to have some of the old ideas repeated to you, it definitely makes me realise a lot of things I could be doing better but had just gone out of my radar for one reason or another.

When the two projects are happening at the same time, it gives both teams the advantage that they can communicate with  and adapt more often to each other’s needs. It does bring a question on how to synchronise two independent streams of work, since not doing it might bring a lot of headache in terms of stories being blocked because dependencies haven’t been met, which ends up being a lot of waste.

In my current project, we have been using a visual technique to managedependencies which has been proven successful in terms of identifying dependent stories with minimal overwork.

• All stories that rely on external teams receive a red dot, which represents they can’t be played before the dependency is verified.
• Once the external team finishes their part of the work, a blue dot is written on the card, specifying the dependency can be tested by our team
• An integration test gets written against that feature, and if everything works as expected, the story received a green dot, showing that it is ready to be played

So far, the technique has reduced the feedback cycle between us and the external team on which we depend. Testing the stories just after they have been developed means that we can give early feedback about if they are working or not, and avoid starting to work in tasks that cannot be completed.

If you were one of the participants, thanks a lot for coming!

It was also the first time we’ve tried a new format for the game, giving the possibility to each team to come up with their own process in the third round. It was quite interesting to see different ways that people approached the problem and I definitely think it was an improvement from the old way we did it.

As a last point if you don’t know yet, the game is distributed under the Creative Commons Licence. Get in touch with me or Danilo if you are interested in running it.

We will be presenting the Lean Lego Game, which introduces Lean concepts using a fun and entertaining activity. This game was already presented at Agile US and XP Europe, but it’s the first time we are doing it in Australia.

Since Danilo couldn’t come (Australia is still far away from everything…), this time I will be presenting with Fabio Pereira, who has kindly agreed to help me. Everything is quite exciting since we made some changes to it based on feedback we’ve got, so we’re quite keen to see how it goes!

If you are around, please come join us on Thursday morning, and hopefully you will get something out of it. If you do, don’t forget to let us know your opinions.

And in case you don’t know it already, the game is distributed under the Creative Commons license. In case you want to run it in your company or some other group, we have all the material ready to help you, and are happy to distribute it.

As typical Gen-Y students, the new TWers from our term had a very short attention span, and would (correctly!) reject any topic that wasn’t of their interest, which made us come up with different formats in order to try to make everything interesting.

In this case, it all started when we had to deliver a presentation on a new concept and a challenge was made:

How fast can you deliver this presentation so we can go back to coding ?

As proud trainers that we were, we took the bait and stated that we could deliver a 1.5 hr session in 10 mins. It doesn’t need to be said that we didn’t do it, but from that experiment we started a new format of sessions, based on very short feedback loops.

The idea was to deliver the sessions in 10 min chunks, asking for feedback and adapting every time, in a process like this:

1. Ask every student to raise their hand describing how confident they were in the subject we wanted to talk about. They could show any number btw 1 (not confident at all) to 5 (I should be delivering this session, not you!).
2. Have a timeboxed 10 min presentation on the topic
3. Have the students voting again and question them about what they weren’t understanding or doubts they still had.
4. Do it again

We repeated that process until everyone was voting around 3 or 4.
I was quite satisfied with the result. We managed to get a lot of good feedback during the sessions, which is usually hard, and also wouldn’t have to (or couldn’t) prepare to much, since we didn’t know which direction the presentation would take.

In some cases the first 10 minutes were a complete disaster, with everyone saying that they didn’t learn anything, but since we were stopping and discussing it, we were able to change direction (sometimes by changing the presenter :P) and fix it.
In addition to that, we did finish most of the presentations that were usually done in 1.5hrs in less than 30 min, which is always good to hear :)

If you are running an informal (or even formal) session, I would definitely recommend this format. Im sure you will get surprised about what you hear!