Talk: Team process modelling: draw your way to self improvement
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Speaker:
Jitesh Gosai
Talk description
Title:
Team process modelling: draw your way to self improvement
Short synopsis:
How using inspiration from a ten minute TED talk about toast lead to workshops on modelling teams’ processes of how they deliver value to end users. We start by asking the very simple question: How do you make Toast? Using this concept, I’ll lead the team through a series of exercises to uncover how their process actually works, developing a ubiquitous language to describe their processes and how to engage the whole team. From this point I guide the participants to generate ideas on how the teams could use the models to self-improve.
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Long synopsis (optional):
Fed up with the usual evenings of rubbish on the tele, my partner and I took on the task of ‘A TED talk a Day’, to break the monotony and start learning something new instead. This led to far more than we could have imagined a simple change could have created. And also became the starting point of a workshop I would deliver to teams across the BBC, which built a collaborative understanding of work processes. The lightbulb moment for me was during a talk by Tom Wujec called “How you make toast”. This ten minute talk described how getting each participant to draw the process of making toast. Bizarre as it might sound, it demonstrated how each person sees the world differently, in a visual way. I realised that this would be useful within the teams I worked with, having noticed a difference in the language and terminology used within projects. With this fresh insight in mind, I set about working on a way to bring it to life within my work and the teams I am involved with. Having spent many years observing the way teams work, I began to dig into the processes they used to build software and wondered whether any of them had actually written it down anywhere. The answer to that one was an inevitable ‘no’ as the processes were rather evolutionary. Of course some teams do write it down, but whether it is referred to is another thing. Luckily my role enables me to try out new workshops with internal teams, which meant that I could trial my ideas of adapting the “How to make toast” concept in a software engineering environment. Having conducted over ten sessions, I am now confident to share my methodology, results and how it changed the ways of working for the teams. In this talk, I will share how I adapted a ten minute TED talk into a successful three hour workshop to visualise software development team processes. How that helps the team develop a joined up thinking (and wording!) and how to use the outcome in the real world. I’ll demonstrate this by showing how I broke down the TED talk to dive into the mechanics of how the process worked and applying it to visualising the teams process. I’ll go into how we ran the workshop; the key points we covered and how we enabled the team to not only model their process but were able to do this with 10+ people at a time without it turning into complete chaos - even though it did at times look just like that! I will also delve into what we thought the modelling process would bring us and what it actually did. What we did after we created the visualisation and where we could be heading next on our evolution of helping teams understand how they really ship value to their end users. By the end of this talk, you will understand how “How to make toast” is a great lead into discovering your own team processes and how it is possible to use a simple concept to clarify, and visualise it for better team collaboration and understanding of what they are doing. And ultimately, how they are doing it. Takeaways - What the benefits are of drawing your team’s process... without words - How to run a process modelling workshop that includes: - Every member of the team... no matter the size - Producing a model of their process... that includes every single person's viewpoint - Building a team understanding of how they actually work... not how they think they work - The theory behind why this workshop works - And how the theories could be used for other team meetings - What to do with the model once you’ve created it
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