Abstract

What do you at expect from a leader?

• That he goes away?
• That she takes you strong and firmly by the hand?
• That he enforces the team spirit?

• The differences in result.
• Personal taste
• Group dynamic effects

Mini website about the game: http://www.hanoulle.be/leiderschap You can find a dutch article on the website that we will distribute to the players of the game. This might also explain more about how we think about the subject.

Expected benefits of participating

This session lets you see what influence the leaderships style has on your team. It lets you reflect on the leadership style you wish to use or/and wants to get.

What does the session organizer hope to learn?

For us reorganizing this session, will bring us one session closer in the integration between the two worlds we both live in.

Process and timetable

Introduction 20 min
First round: strong visionary leader 30 min
The team gets the order to make a project. The leader directs strongly and takes all the decisions.
Feedback: 10 min
break: 10 min
second round: without a leader 20 min
In this assignment the (same) group has to build another project, but no leader is appointed. The organizers make sure no-one will take leadership.
Feedback: 10 min
Third round: process leader 30 min
Again a (detailed) project has to be made. This time we have a leader who will guide the process, not the product. The leader will get a cheat sheet with tips to look for. The organizers help him, when he would go for the product.
Feedback: 10 min
General feedback: 40 min.
First we ask the leaders to share their experiences.
After that we ask the observers to tell us what they have seen.
And finally the other participants can take the word.

At the end we finish with a little bit of theory about the exercises. At this point in time we distribute three texts.

1st about the three leadership types we experienced in the exercise, with pointing out the advantages for each one In this text, you will find typical pro's and con's of the type. + the typical situations where you can use this leadership type.

2nd text about the rose of Axen.

3rd text - list of books we think could be an interesting read for people who want to learn more about leadership.

4th and 5th texts with extra info about these examples.

You can find the first two articles on the leaderships game website (http://www.hanoulle.be/leiderschap )

We selected these 3 kinds of leaderships because these are the most extreme cases. A real situational leader would use the 2 leadership styles in different situations. By playing it so extremely it becomes a lot clearer for the participants.

History

We have both followed and given different workshops, trainings about Team building in all kinds of environments.

We have already played this game once for freelanceforum, an organization with IT freelancers, and this was well received and we have been giving a lot of positive feedback. Not only the "leaders" learned a lot but also the other players learned alot about "their prefered way of being led" and how they look at a leader.

We hope to play this game also in the Belgium XP group in September as well.

Language

We do this session in dutch. Although we both speak English and French, we prefer to play this game in Dutch. We think that for a optimal simulation, we want to be as close to the inner world of participants. We are convinced that for explaining what we see happening it is best that we do this in our mother tongue.]]> pascal 03 November 2005 22:29 GMT http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2005/RailsHype.html Xpday2005/RailsHype

Abstract

Rails is a newcomer in the web framework space but has already gained an unsurpassed following in the last year. Part of the reason of this is the agile mindset from which Rails was born, and the use of Ruby, a language which lends itself excellently for agile development. Most of the attention arose because of the outrageous claims made by its author and his fanatical followers.

Rails is billed as an 'Agile' web framework. What's so agile about it? Do the claims stand up to reality?

The presenters have developed an application using Rails and want to share and discuss their experience with session participants.

Benefits of attending

• See through the hype! Is Rails really as effective as promised? Is it agile?
• Learn about another way of developing web applications.
• Learn a bit about the Ruby language.
• Pick up agile techniques for use in your own projects.
• Benefit from the mistakes we made.

What will the organisers learn

• Other opinions from different backgrounds about the Rails framework.
• Learn of similar agile techniques with less agile languages.
• Questions and doubts people who are unfamiliar with Rails will epxress.

Session Outline

• 60 min: See through the Rails hype!
  • Short introduction to Rails & the 'agile' in Agile Web Development with Rails
  • We will talk about our experiences with a real Rails project, one that affects all Xp Day participants! We will talk about the difficulties we encountered and the things that went really well in the entire development cycle of the application, from planning the application to deploying it. We encourage participants to ask any questions and voice concerns they have about using Rails.

• 60 min: Experience the Rails hype! Volunteers from the audience can
  • Change some features in the application we developed
  • Add new features to the application
  • Create a (small) new application

Abstract

The Agile Manifesto states: "we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Tools and techniques are not enough for running your projects, you need 'people tools' as well. We all know that for instance developers and customers fighting abouth who did what wrong doesn't make our projects finish early, yet it is hard to stop doing it. Especially when the pressure is on. This session provides tools and processes for individuals and interactions, to help you take a step towards peaceful, effective projects.

This workshop is based on Virginia Satir's work. A shorter version has been run at the Agile Open conference

This session is meant for anyone who wants to become more effective through:

• awareness of how our way of communicating influences others and vice versa
• consciousness of the change processes in self, others and the context so that we can surf the waves of change, rather than drowning in the surf of the waves

Benefits of attending

After this workshop, you can:

• lose less time and energy due to fighting
• balance interaction between developers, management and customers
• develop a long-term trust relationship between developers, management and customers
• get your team into a state of flow, where the team delivers more value, while being more relaxed at the same time
• focus on problems - create an atmosphere where underlying problems surface themselves, so appropriate solutions can be devised.

What will the organisers learn

Get more experience in facilitating; be able to develop this session further towards a full-blown multi-day Satir workshop

Session Outline

this workshop is highly experiential. We use role play, games and discussion so that participants will experience the tools, rather than only hearing about them. The maximum number of participants is 20.

Timetable:

• Introduction (10 min)
• Congruent action (90 min)
  • Brief explanation of the self/other/context model as taught by Virginia Satir
  • Roleplay introduction, participants expiriment with various stances people choose in difficult situations.
  • Roleplay. We use a technique called 'Sculpting' to act out how the XP values or the values from the Agile Manifesto are present or not in work situations.
• Break (10 min)
• Changing the way we change (45 min)
  • Experiencing the Satir Change model and learn to embrace change
• Temperature reading - evaluation and closing of the workshop (25 min)