7th ACE Conference (2016)

Posted on by Tomek Kaczanowski

My findings from the 7th ACE! conference (2016, Krakow, Poland). Check their website.

They say that “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” So maybe I was ready, and ACE! appeared in the right moment to teach me a gazillion of things. Frankly, I can’t remember any other event that I finished with so many new pointers, new ideas, new things on my TODO list or inspiring quotes. I can’t possibly list them all here, but at least I will share some of them with you.

The order is pretty random. The quotes are not really quotes but close to it. 🙂 Some things were never mentioned directly, but I read them (imagined them?) somewhere “between the lines”.

  • Shu Ha Ri – mentioned all over the place
  • Causal Loop Diagram,  Current Reality Tree, Cynefin
  • You can copy solution, but not the context (AKA, “we are not Spotify!”). Yeah, read what others do, be inspired, but find your own solutions. Your context is different.
  • Mary Poppendieck is awesome. Can’t get enough of her lectures. 🙂
    • on a downside, her workshop wasn’t a workshop but the continuation of keynote lecture
  • The art of scrum mastering / agile coach is to disappear.
  • A team should have a mission. Easy to say when you work for NASA Moon program. But what about a team that works for normal business? How to create an exiting motto for such a team? Maybe start small, with something different. Try to find (together) some working principles, identify team values, list things the team won’t tolerate.
  • Sketchnoting is not for me. Yes, I learned that I can draw a happy guy and a tired lady, and even a grandpa with mustache, but how on earth could I use it to make notes? You gotta be kidding me! (But I will show my new skills to my kids, and I bet they will appreciate!)
  • Real options – delay the commitment
  • Put your money where your mouth is. E.g. do you promote kanban boards? Fine, so where is yours?
    • …ouch! where is mine?
  • Deploy (technical) and release (marketing) are different things. Feature toggles help.
  • Constraints can be pretty helpful, they help you to do only important work. (That is why I limited the time to write this blog post.)
  • Peer coaching (peer-feedback, peer-to-peer review) should be separated from promotions, salaries etc.

System & Process

  • Do not start working on a story until you know how to measure its impact.
  • Creators should be immediately connected with what they create.
  • Teams should solve problems, not deliver features.
  • PO – build a hypothesis, team – build and experiment ASAP.
  • You and your team are parts of the system. Complaining about the system is stupid, you are part of it, you can affect it, so work towards changing it.
  • The process often stands in the way of a passionate team. Forget the process. Let them work independently. They will do great.

Diversity

Naomi Ceder – Antipatterns for Diversity

  • Impossible to see a problem when you belong to the privileged group.
  • If you are privileged you find ways to justify that you belong there
  • Compliments are often nicely wrapped up stereotypes.

Experiments & Co.

Experiments – yes, you should do them:

  • be really crazy about it: Popcorn Flow by Claudio Perrone 
  • you experiment more, you learn more, you learn faster, you outsmart your competition etc.
  • reminds me of Management 3.0 Celebration Grid (silly name, BTW)
  • You should know what you expect, how you decide whether it was a victory or a failure.
  • If you are not ashamed with your first release, it means you waited too long.

Thing is really done when:

Do’s and Don’ts when you attend a conference

  • Coaching sessions are a must.
    • BTW. There were coaching sessions with some great coaches and not all were taken. I don’t understand it. You prefer to see a presentation when you can have a 1on1 conversation about your issues/problems/situation with some Guru?!
  • Open Space discussions are great. Especially when the owner is prepared.
  • Don’t take a laptop with you. Don’t bother with tweets. Be there, listen, talk. Pen & paper will be enough.
  • The food at ACE! is delicious. Prepare a box next time, take some cookies home. 😉
  • Talk with people. Talk with the speakers. Talk. They won’t bite you.
  • Write a blog post right after the event is finished. Otherwise you will never do it. (Yeah, I did it!)

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