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 WS13 

    

ot2003 Session

Systems thinking for Coaches

   

Find the systems behind your experiences and gain more insight in the organisation(s) you are working for.

Tuesday 1 April, 14:30

workshop -    150 minutes

Marc Evers
Willem van den Ende
Vera Peeters
Erik Groeneveld

 
Abstract
Once we started to value people over tools, we realized we still had a lot to learn... telling stories and making systems diagrams with other coaches is a decent way to understand what is happening around us, and to find ways in which we can help the organisations we work for to change, and improve the way they develop software.

Systems thinking is a conceptual tool that is useful for understanding the dynamics of teams and projects. This session focuses on seeing teams and projects as systems of interacting variables. Systems thinking helps to see the whole instead of just the individual effects between variables, and to identify nonlinear effects. Furthermore, it helps to find self-reinforcing and possibly destructive feedback loops.

Audience
Coaches who work with software development teams, either as a pure coach or as a programmer and/or manager. Participants should have a basic understanding of the principles of systems thinking (see e.g. Weinberg's Quality Software Management series or Peter Senge's books)
Benefits
As a participant of this session, you will learn how to use systems thinking concepts to:

* understand the dynamics of development teams and projects;

* find 'leverage points' in situations so that the next time you're in a similar situation you have more actions to choose from;

* make your mental models explicit so you can explain your ideas more clearly, and understand more often why not everyone 'sees it your way'.

The session enables you to learn from your own and from others' experiences in a structured way.

Materials
  • stories brought in by participants: participants are asked to think about specific team or process related problems that they frequently encounter in their work and that they cannot explain fully.
  • the participants are encouraged to bring books in the subject area they find interesting. The presenters will bring some of Senge's and Weinbergs' work for reference.

 

Marc Evers

Piecemeal Growth 		Marc Evers helps developers, customers, and project managers in co-creating value through meaningful projects, by coaching, consulting, and developing software. Since 2000, he co-organizes workshops and conferences (XP Day Benelux: http://www.xpday.net and Agile Open: http://www.agileopen.net) based on systems thinking, XP, and agile values, principles, and practices.

Willem van den Ende

Vera Peeters

TRYX 		Vera Peeters is an independent consultant. She runs her own company TRYX [http://www.tryx.com]. She has more than 15 years experience in developing software systems, especially object-oriented development in all kinds of high-technological environments. She has been practicing agile ways of working since 1999.

Vera has presented workshops at several conferences: XP200X, XPUniverse, OT200X, XPDays (Benelux, Londen, Germany). She is a co-organizer of the [XPDay Benelux@http://www.xpday.be]. In 2001, she founded the [Belgian XP User Group@http://www.xp.be] together with [Pascal Van Cauwenberghe@http://www.nayima.be].

Erik Groeneveld

Seek You Too Softwarestudio 		Erik just loves programming. After a couple of years of advice, research and coaching and change managment, he has returned to his first love and now runs the Software Studio in his own company Seek You Too. (Seek You Too has been started together with together with WillemvandenEnde, who still is a coach and change artist. General management is now done by Jeanet Hoving, Erik is the technical manager.)

In October 2000, Erik and Willem started XP-NL, the Dutch XP interestgroup [http://www.xpnl.org] (not so active anymore, there is XPDays now) and during spring 2002, together with [PascalVanCauwenberghe], [VeraPeeters] [PeterSchrier] and [MarcEvers], they started the Systems Thinking group [http://systemsthinking.org] and organize XPDays Benelux [http://www.xpday.net]. Erik is a board member of Agile Systems vzw.

Erik always tries to improve on whatever he is doing. This led to, for example,

Currently, Erik is actively involved in the Meresco component library [http://meresco.org]. This includes some interesting gems he hopes to bring to SPA in the future.

Thank you for reading!

Erik

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