Affordance-Driven Process Improvement: Designing a Process that Works for Your Team
Add to calendarThe best processes are those that encourage teams to naturally do the right things at the right times. Amazing processes like this don’t happen by accident; they are specifically designed to encourage desirable behavior while discouraging harmful behaviour. By carefully choosing the process’s affordances — practices or artifacts that direct our thinking toward a specific goal — a team can tailor a process that makes success intuitive. The session will begin by presenting the core concepts behind affordence-driven process improvement before diving into a collaborative workshop.
During the workshop teams (tables) will use information from the introduction to brainstorm values (as quality attribute stories) and affordances that will help them promote those values. By the the end of this workshop attendees will have produced posters which serve as actionable examples they can take home to their teams — and artifacts for continuing the conversation in the hallways.
In this workshop, teams will address the following questions:
What properties does my team value in a process?
What techniques/methods/processes promote or inhibit specific properties?
What is a process affordance and how can I choose the right ones for my team to drive process improvement?
How do I pick the right process for my team?
Intended Audience
People new to agile who don’t know where to start
High-level executives and managers who want to take an active role in shaping their team’s future
Process improvement professionals who want to explore a new way to look at teams and organizations
All design, Process and team fanatics
Presentation History / References to Speaking Ability
Michael Keeling hosted popular and highly reviewed sessions on the Insights stage at XP2010 and Agile2011. He frequently shares his ideas in front of an audience, and facilities workshops for small teams at work and in the local agile and tech communities. You can find a complete summary of his public speaking engagements online at http://neverletdown.net/topics/talks/.
Ariadna Font regularly leads and facilitates collaborative design sessions and retrospectives for an engineering team of over 30 people. Moreover, she organizes and facilitates well-attended and well-recieved collaborative design sessions and large team retrospectives in the Agile community (http://www.meetup.com/PittsburghAgile/events/37027802/ http://agile-barcelona.org/2011/12/building-applications-for-the-users-a... http://www.meetup.com/PittsburghAgile/events/46350422/).
For additional background on the concepts covered in this workshop and prior talks on this subject see:
http://neverletdown.net/2010/03/identifying-process-affordances-nudging-... — summary of a talk, “Process Affordances: Nudging Toward Change”, which presents the idea of affordance-driven process improvements. Links to a more formal paper and slides from that presentation are included.
http://neverletdown.net/2009/03/process-affordances-ignore-at-your-own-p... — initial idea with a story of how paying attention to process affordances helped one team. Alistair Cockburn commented on the page that this is a “lovely idea…a new way of looking at processes.”
Introduction – 15 min — Introduce core concepts, walk-through an example scenario, Q&A
Workshop – 75 min
Deliverable: At the end of the workshop, each team will present their poster with about 10 techniques to promote their team’s values, 5-10 techniques that would inhibit desired values, and 3 immediate steps that they can take to start promoting their values and working towards their goals.
This is how it will happen:
5 minutes - Teams (tables) are given a poster with one of 3 different scenarios (containing team values, goals and current process)
20 minutes - Teams brainstorm to find 10 (agile) techniques/methods/process changes that will help them achieve or promote their values and goals, and add them to their poster
10 minutes - Teams brainstorm to identify 5-10 techniques that will hinder them from achieving or promoting their values and goals, and add them to their poster
15 minutes — Team retrospectives. Given your team’s values/goals/processes, what should your team’s immediate next steps be? Teams pick 3 action items which effect can be evaluated within 2 weeks
5 minutes - Finalize posters
~10 - 20 minutes - Each team summarizes their findings (2 min/team)
- By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
- View process through the eyes of a designer — allowing you to design your own custom processes.
- Elicit affordances (the -ilities) valued by your team and record them as “values stories”.
- Use “values stories” to identify practices that are nudging your team toward success or away from it.
- Explain to your team what affordances are and describe the psychology behind why they work.