Speaking at PMI-Rome “Agile Project Management in Action!” seminar

Friday the 12th of April, I’m giving a talk at “Agile Project Management in Action!” seminar, organized by PMI-Rome.

Besides me also participate great speakers from inspearit Italy, HP, TenStep and Ericsson; the seminar will be hosted by: Università degli Studi Roma Tre,  Facoltà di Economia “Federico Caffè”,  Via Silvio D’amico, 77 Roma.

This is the link to the registration page and this is the link to the detailed programme.

See you there!

Talk “Talent, Passion, Excellence and Agile” (slideshare)

Here it is the presentation of my talk “Driving team talent, through passion, achieving excellence in an agile environment” at Better Software 2012 Conference in Florence.

Speaking at Better Software Conference

Thursday the 27th, I’m giving a talk at the Better Software conference in Florence.

I’m really happy to be one of the speakers of the Better Software Conference and eager to participate. Lots of interesting talks, given by excellent speakers belonging to the italian agile panorama.

This is the link to the program page of of the two-days conference.

My talk is about talent, passion and excellence within agile teams: here it is the abstract.

I also got interviewed, as the other speakers as well, and this is the link.

So, see you there guys!

PMI-NIC Pecha Kucha Event

Thursday June the 28th, the PMI-NIC organized an event in the pecha kucha format, where six talks have been presented, one was mine. The format requires the speaker to present no more and no less than twenty slides, which are temporized: 20 seconds each.

A challenge because you must explain the message in a concise way, getting rid of any superfluous message (entropy) and going straight to the heart of what you want to communicate for each slide.

Here below a short description of such a format of presenting.

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

Before we started the presentations, we had an interesting agile game called ‘The Marshmallow Challenge’ an intersting and fun game about evolutionary design that invite the team to collaboration, innovation and creativity.

It was really cool!

Then it was the time of the talks. Mine was about one of my favourite topics: talent!

The title is Talent, passion and excellence in agile teams and it is downloadable from the PMI-NIC website.

It’s 13Mb so be patient

Newspaper article about Manifesta and my talk

A local newspaper (http://www.merateonline.it/articolo.php?idd=20949) published an article about the Manifesta festival.

Inside is also reported an abstract of my talk “Creativity, Talent and Agility”

Driving team talent, through passion, achieving excellence

The Agile Team: a tribe or a theatral troupe?

http://broadwayhour.blogspot.com

Belonging to a theatral troupe, actors work for a long period each one near the other, they are invited, sometimes obliged by the situations, to find the most effective working behaviors, sinergies and approaches in order to let the show hits the ground.
Any actor should have a talent, have studied and practiced a lot, know very well her part in the show. But this is not enough because she is called to adapt, adjust and tailor his artistic behaviour to the existing boundaries: the other actors with their parts, behaviors, skills and approaches.
Furthermore, the actors must limit theirselves and their behaviors within spaces (the stage, the scenes), timings (acts, show).
Finally, they use as well iterations when make the rehearsals.

http://humansarefree.com/2011/06/ten-commandments-of-native-american.html

Members that belong to a tribe, accept to share not only the usual activities such as hunting, providing for the maintenance of the tribe or, furthermore, fighting. They want to share also personal experiences, spaces, feelings, emotions, accepting rules and participating in rituals and ceremonies.

 

Hence, an agile team member, like an actor, should know the “theory” and should have practiced a lot. Every activity he does is limited in terms of time (iterations), space (the workplace). He should be able to communicate well enough to collaborate with the teammates and be effective working in a group. He will take advantage of the feedback coming from the iterations and discovering and learning form the experience.

An agile team member, like a member of a tribe, should accept and follows some rules, to find the right balance between his expectations and the ones of the group. He should trust the other members at least until his trust is betrayed and in my experience this does not happen too frequently in an agile team.

Actually the parallelism with rugby is somehow perfect. Scrum in rugby, is the way the members as a team operate to conquer the ball against the counterparts.

Personal Alignment

Are you really focusing on your objectives? Do you know exactly what are they? Are your personal attitudes and strengths, completely aligned to reach those objectives?

What I’ve found so fascinating in that book, regards some remarkable techniques that can be used to align yourself. Align in terms of better understanding which scope and objectives you want/would/should aim to and, finally, arranging a way to to effectively achieve them.

Sometimes, in fact, it happens that I found myself struggling for taking important business or prefessional decisions. In those case I use some suggestions coming from that book and some other taken from PM and PNL to find my own way.

This post limits the context to which those techniques can be applied, to the work environment, but whatever techniques can be used, obviously, for other environment as well.

Ready?! Let’s go!

Do you know exactly which are your strengths and weaknesses? Sure?

And again, do you know which opportunities may arise exploiting your strengths?

And to which threats you are exposed due to your weaknesses?

Well, if you need a technique that helps you arranging and organizing your ideas in that way, here there’s the most used: the SWOT! Yes,  a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).

Start with the first quadrant top left: your strengths.

Answer the following questions:

• What do you do well?
• What unique resources can you draw on?
• What do others see as your strengths?

In short, your most valuable characteristics/attributes/attitudes!

To help you focus on that, think when in the past  you solved easily a particular situation or problem, where the others did not succeed.

Or, again, if there are things you are able to do without struggling as the others do. Often, in those situations, you find yourself surprised when the others tell you: “What? Already finished? How did you do so quickly?”

Ok, now it’s time to face your weaknesses. Do this with the utmost honesty you can.

Answer to the following questions:

• What could you improve?
• Where do you have fewer resources than others?
• What are others likely to see as weakness?

Think to the things that do not love, activities that make you spend a lot of time or resources than the others. What limits you, approaching to your job.

Well done, it’s time to wear the positive hat, the yellow one: do you remember De Bono and his six thinking hats technique? In this post I explained how to use that technique to identify risks in a project.

Now, list the opportunities that could arise if only you could steer toward the right direction, the explosive power of your strengths.

Answer to these questions:

• What good opportunities are open to you?
• What trends could you take advantage of?
• How can you turn your strengths into opportunities?

Try to report things that are specific, concrete, measurable, obviously achievable in a time frame significantly limited. You must set SMART objectives.

Oh, you don’t know what the acronym SMART stands for. Well, take a look to what says my friend Wikipedia.

Ok, now we are near to the end, only the last quadrant is missing: threats.

Answer to these questions:

• What trends could harm you?
• What is your competition doing more/better than you?
• What threats do your weaknesses expose you to?

Look at your weaknesses, how bad they are? Are they really so limiting? Do really they could have a huge impact on your objectives? If they don’t, ignore them.

If yes, instead, you should work on them or, at least, to the those that are the most negatively impactful,

Attention, think seriously and honestly to the things above but remember, you must focus mainly on your strengths. Do you know any champion that daily tries to address his weaknesses instead to improve his best qualities and capabilities?

Are you really interested in perk up your weaknesses?

It is not a matter of being a professional that is quite good doing everything, it’s a matter of being a passionate professional perfectly able to do the things s/he loves most!

Talent joins attitudes, habits, mental schemes, thoughts, past experiences.

A unique way to be for everyone of us. Find your talent, be committed to it and persevere. The rest is a matter of training! Be patient and faithful.

This is the first post of a small series, in the next we will discuss about some other techniques that help to define which objectives we want to achieve, in which time frame and how we can remove any impediments.

This sounds familiar to me, isn’t it?

Improve the team

Oggi, con questo intervento, voglio consolidare quanto detto in alcuni post passati, a proposito del team e degli approcci per incrementarne competenze e performance (Creatività e talento, Develop the team, management’s challanges).

Propongo idee, metodi e tecniche che vanno in quella direzione.

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