Free Presentation by Joseph Pelrine - February 5
As discussed on the SyXPAC list, we are lucky enough to have Joseph Pelrine giving a similar talk to the one that the audience at Agile 2006 loved last year. This should be relevant to anyone practicing any Agile method who would like a better understanding of why and how it works so as to be able to adapt it effectively to the organisation. Joseph’s work here is considered to be at the bleeding edge of Agile.
Date: Monday, Feburary 5
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Jacksons On George – 176 George Street, Sydney
The abstract for Joseph’s talk is as follows.
How Agile works – Agility and Social Complexity
The use of so-called “Agile” methods such as eXtreme Programming and Scrum has helped many software projects to success, although it’s not always clear why and how. An understanding of the roots of agility though, is a requirement for adopting and adapting agile processes in organisations. New research in the field of social complexity theory provides an explanation for when and how agile methods work. By using techniques from this relatively new field, developers and managers can more easily adapt agile methods to the idiosyncracies of specific organisations and projects, are more aware of weak signals that can lead to problems, and can design interventions to correct them.
This talk provides a short introduction to social complexity theory, especially the Cynefin multi-ontological sense-making framework, and illustrates its application to agile software development.
Some (fairly heavy) background material on the Cynifin sense-making framework can be found in Kurtz and Snowden’s paper titled The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world
Note that this talk is on the eve of the Scrum Certification Course at the Swiss-Grand at Bondi Beach. This may be convenient for interstate people attending the course.
It would be great if you could RSVP to the post on the Scrum Announce list so we all know who the Scrum-types are to look out for on the night.
Comment
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Thanks David, your work is very interesting and I look forward to learning more about it on Monday evening. I’ll pass your comments on to Joseph.
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For those that didn’t make it to Joseph’s talk, we had over 30 people there including one Martin Fowler! It was great to meet the SyXPAC crew, catch up with some ScrumMasters from Joseph’s first certification course 2 years ago see a couple of familiar Smalltalkers. The people I spoke to afterwards seemed to have enjoyed the presentation and found it very thought provoking.
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26 January 2007, 11:07
There is a range of material at www.cognitive-edge.com which covers the Cynefin framwork and has some supporting methods. Some of it less “heavy” than New Dynamics. We are also doing some work at the moment on narrative based software and there is interest in the AGILE community (UK) in using that. I would be interested to see the how you are using the framework so if slides are available it would be appreciated. Ironically I am in Brisbane at the moment running an accreditation course in CE methods including Cynefin. Best of luck with this and honoured that you find the framework useful.