[Wylug-discuss] XP Club this Thursday, 7pm at the Queens hotel, the Rochester Room.

[David Turner]

Hi all,

Clarke has kindly offered to do a talk for this months XP club, and the
venue has been changed to the Queen's Hotel to allow Clarke to present
in slightly more salubrious surroundings. I have booked the Rochester
room from 7.00pm till 9.00pm which will hopefully be plenty of time.
http://qurl.com/y2wfc

There are some questions at the bottom of this email that Clarke would
like people who are going to attend to answer, to help the evening. If
people want to email me their answers, then I will collate them, and
forward to Clarke.

Here is Clarke's overview of his talk.

------------------------------------------------------

Programmers may be from Mars,
Customers may be from Venus ...

but why does everyone think that
Project Managers are from Uranus?

An agile workshop facilitated by Clarke Ching, October 11th, 2007.

*What? *I spent a good part of my career thinking that Project Managers
are either well meaning idiots or bad intentioned manipulators. All that
went away, of course, when I started managing projects and I discovered
that most Project Managers are - just like developers - good people
trying to do a hard job.

This session will explore the causes of common conflicts between the
"workers" and the "managers" on software projects. We will discover that
most of the conflicts are caused by "the system" rather than the
"people".
We will discover ways around these conflicts ... and make our jobs
easier and more fun.

This is a great opportunity to discover what motivates and concerns
"them".
You'll also learn how to use a powerful tool for uncovering and then
resolving conflicts in a win-win manner.  You'll also help me write my
book.

[This session will also be run later this year at XPDay2007 (hopefully)]

*Who?* Clarke Ching is a New Zealander who now lives in Scotland. He is
a passionate advocate of agile software development and is chairman of
the AgileScotland special interest group, which meets monthly in
Edinburgh.
Clarke has an MBA specializing in technology management and currently is
writing a book (www.rollingrocksdownhill.com), which explains why
working on and managing software projects often feels like pushing rocks
uphill and shows how to use lean, quality, and agile techniques to make
them easier, more productive, and predictable.

*When are Where?*  We'll be meeting at the Queens Hotel, next to Leeds
train station at 7.00pm on Thursday October the 11th. Link to the hotel:
http://qurl.com/y2wfc

------------------------------------------------------

Clarks request for information...

1) Are you a manager, a non-manager or other/both?

2) Can you tell me something that annoys you about "them", in general.
You can send me a few annoyances if you like, or none.  A couple of
sentences per annoyance should do.  I'll collate them offline.

It would help if you write it in the form
 - As a developer/analyst/tester/other I find it really annoying when my
project manager does this ...
 - As a PM I find it really annoying when my staff [doen't] do this ...

e.g. As a project manager I find it annoying when I ask my developers
how long a task will take and they ask me "how long is a piece of
string?.
e.g. As a developer I find it annoying when my Project Manager doesn't
give me enough time to do my job properly.
e.g. As a developer I hate it when my PM prints of code I've written,
reads it over the weekend, then gives me corrections - written in read
ink - on Monday morning.

It'd be helpful if you tell me if this behaviour happened in an Agile
environment or other.

Email answers to the above to david.turner at erudine.com so that I can
collate and forward.

------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to Clarke for taking time to run what I am sure will be a very
interesting meeting, hopefully see lots of you there.

Cheers,




David. 

http://www.extremeprogrammingclub.com
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