System Thinking techniques for Agile Teams – seeing the forest and the trees
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Presentation |
Intermediate
Methodology and Business
Room:
Lab 3
Timeslot:
18.09.08 11:45
Speaker: Martine Devos
Abstract
Lean and agile methods tell us to “see the system”.
System thinking skills are important for all agile teammembers. However they are not part of our day-to-day toolkit we got in school or university.
This session introduces the participants to 7 practical system thinking tools and visialisation techniques that will help us map and explore the dynamic complexity of our (software) projects.
These tools can be used in retrospectives, kickoffs, to look at long term consequences of policies and choices. They support the (software) management process at all stages – from specifying problems, to construction and testing of hypothesis.
Outline:
- Intro to systems and systems modelling (5 min)
- Tradititional versus System Thinking skills (each 5 minutes – 35 minutes)
- Static -> dynamic (from focus on events to focus on patterns over time)
- System-as-effect -> system-as-cause (from viewing system as driven by external forces to ** placing responsibility for behaviour on internal actors who manage policies)
- Tree-by-tree -> forest thinking (from believe that really knowing depends on details to believing that we must understand context)
- Factors-thinking -> operational thinking (from listing factors of influence or correlation to understanding of causality and how behaviour is actually generated)
- Straight-line thinking -> closed-loop-thinking (from viewing causality as running one way to the effect of feedback and causes affecting each other)
- Measurement thinking -> quantitative thinking (from searching for perfect measures to accepting that we can always quantify but not always measure)
- Proven-truth thinking -> scientific thinking (seeking to prove to be right to recognizing frames and models have limited applicability)
- For each of those skills we will present a good practice tool – model/drawing/brainstorm technique
- Dynamic thinking – behaviour over time diagrams
- System-as-cause – instead of blaming ask “how could those within the system make the system more resilient to external causes” – causal loop diagrams
- Forest thinking – focus on similarities rather than differences
- Operational thinking – ...
- 20 minutes -- We will build a small model (requirements lack, change, shortcuts) with the participant (causal loop diagram)
- 5 min> Q and A
Required experience:
Involvement in project at any level
Expected audience:
Managers, executotives, team leaders, scrum masters… interested in increasing their impact on systemic variable – quality, time to market…
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Martine DevosMartine Devos is organizational development consultant and trainer with comprehensive business background. She brought many projects and product development efforts back on track in both government and services sector. She has extensive managerial experience in both traditional and agile environments. She mastered successive waves of technology innovation to conceptualize, design and deploy mission critical business-focused ICT solutions in Fortune 500 companies and in the public sector. She trains and coaches teams in agile principles and practices of Scrum, Extreme Programming and Lean Software Engineering. For her first Scrum project – for the Belgian department of education, involving 500 schools -- she got the title of ICT manager of the year in 1998. She initiated and successfully implemented organizational and cultural change initiatives at both companywide and team level in multicultural environments. She has been Program Chair of EuroPlop, and frequent speaker at OOPSLA, ECOOP, TOOL, SPA and JAOO conferences. She continues her research in the dynamics of projects and multi release product development and the impact of agile methods and estimation practices together with MIT and WPI graduate students.