A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. Our era is increasingly characterized by an emergent “software culture.” Not only is software itself creating much of our global wealth, but the unique challenges of creating our software have demanded wholly new types of engineered corporate culture from us. In response to the demands of software, various high tech development disciplines have been articulated and “packaged up.” We have created several seminal management “movements” (such as Agile, Scrum, XP, etc.). These movements represent the birth of culture engineering and are primitive compared to what will soon follow.

Culture hacking is itself a distinct kind of culture engineering, and is faithful to the particular hacker ethos that originated in the world of software hacking. Good culture hacking will tend to protect personal freedom, extend openness, embody rationality and promote culture design elegance. Culture hacking takes into account the limits and uses of authority, is skeptical of incoherent institutional power, and is subversive of it. As our many cultures become increasingly (and fruitfully) hacked, we will likely grow in effectiveness, and ambition. This will bring more and more of the world’s problems into manageable scope. This will likely trigger an unprecedented Golden Era.

When the process they follow is not giving the results they need some project or product managers (or team leads, developers, or whoever) choose to attempt an Agile approach, yet they are frustrated as they continue to get the same bad results as before. They struggle with the same old problems – and typically have introduced some new ones.

My observation: People are trying to solve the wrong problem(s). Typically they are either trying to “solve” symptoms and not a real problem, or they have a mistaken understanding of what is important. This leads to waste trying to solve irrelevant or non-existent problems.

Until this is addressed, the process we follow isn’t the critical issue – unless we can find a process or set of guidelines that will help us expose and deal with real problems. We need a way to ruthlessly track down and fix our misconceptions, and we need to be good at this.

My goal is to help us see that “We have met the enemy, and he is US” – [Pogo, 1971, Walt Kelly]. I probably won’t be able to do that, but you gotta have goals don’t you?… or do you?

We’ll start this session with a quick information gathering exercise where we’ll each suggest a problem we’re having. We’ll pick a few of them as a starting point and see if we can move toward a better understanding of the real problems that need our attention.

About Woody Zuill:
Woody Zuill is a software developer, development team manager, and Agile expert. He has had numerous successes and plenty of failures using an Agile based approach to solve real problems in software development efforts. He continues to learn from his mistakes.

This talk will begin at 6:30pm on Thursday, November 3rd at The Linkery in North Park.

To receive meeting announcements via email, sign up to our Yahoo! group.

We are launching our 1st Agile Hackathon in San Diego !

It will be a free event, Great and Fun, hands on pure Agile and Lean Development.
The leading agile specialist of San Diego are going to be there coaching us in the main Agile and Lean practices.
You can expect real projects with real coding for a whole day of Stand up Meetings, Planning Poker, Demos, Retrospective, etc.

It all starts on Thursday, March 10, from 7pm to 9pm, with Product/Market Fit activities.
Then, Friday, March 11, 7pm to 9pm, for Project Preparations
And Saturday, March 12, from 8am to 6pm, for the actual Agile Hackathon.

Come learn with us and experience Agile as it was intended. Theory no more!!

Activities Schedule: http://www.agilesandiego.org/monthly-meeting/1st-agile-hackathon-san-diego/

Register Now: http://agilehackathonsandiego.eventbrite.com/

As a member of the steering committee last year, this was a fun project.  Not only did I get a chance to develop new relationships with other members of our group, but I was given the opportunity to meet other Agile practitioners in San Diego, learn what they are doing to help make Agile grow in their organizations and promote the growth of Agile in San Diego.  As a steering committee member volunteer all we ask is that you participate in one face-to-face lunch meeting in January, February, March and April to coordinate and plan.  From time-to-time some outside work may be needed based on your interest level and time available – however it would be no more than an hour a month.

If this volunteer role interests you, please contact June Clarke (joonspoon_at_gmail_dot_com) or Carlton Nettleton (carlton_at_lookforwardconsulting_dot_com) if you think you have time to volunteer.

This will be the fourth time our group has run this simulation and the feedback we get each time is great. Look forward to a fast, fun and entertaining good time. The Extreme Hour games provides creates a clear picture of how XP works as a whole and the importance of many of the XP practices. This game serves as a great introduction to XP, yet also allows for experienced XP practitioners to spike innovations and variations in their practice.

In addition to the game, there will be a visit from SANTA!

Well, not the real one, but the one who lives at Addison-Wesley, the publisher of many books on Agile software development. For those who attend, there will be a book giveaway and general holiday cheer.

As usual, our meeting will take place at The Linkery in North Park starting at 6:30PM. You can grab a beer at the Linkery bar at any time, and are welcome to join us for dinner after the meeting at 8.

Here are directions: http://bit.ly/cRv21j

I expect most of you will be interested in the Q&A session hosted by Brant Cooper at Rock Bottom. It’s $10 if you RSVP now using this link.

Q&A w/ Eric Ries: October 28, 8:00-11:00 @ Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, La Jolla. (Attendance expected to be 75-100.)

Or, if you want to attend the earlier free session, register here.

Entrepreneur Challenge Kickoff: October 28, 5:30-8:00 @ UCSD Price Center East Ballroom.  (Attendance expected to be 300-400.)

1. Certified ScrumMaster (Nov 8th and 9th): I attended this class last year and it is an excellent introduction to Scrum.
2. Succeeding with Agile (Nov 10th and 11th): this is based on the material from Mike’s recent book and should be a very good, practical discussion of how to move forward with Scrum in your organization.

As always, Mike is an excellent and knowledgable instructor and draws on his years of practical experience with Scrum.  These classes will sell-out, so if you are interested in learning about Scrum from one of the founding members of the Scrum Alliance, be sure to sign up.

Now for the meeting description:

Are you just getting OK results with Scrum?  Has Agile not delivered on the much anticipated quantum leads in productivity everyone had been promised?  One common source of lackluster performance comes from following routine behaviors and ordinary patterns of teamwork associated with the “old way of doing things”.  In this hands-on workshop, Carlton Nettleton will share powerful techniques from his coaching toolbox that breaks these old patterns, unlocks the potential of Teams and gets them moving toward high-performance.

Carlton Nettleton, is an Agile software development consultant and thought-leader in San Diego County.  He provides advice, mentoring, coaching and training to teams and programs looking to improve software quality, team work, productivity and apply Lean thinking to software projects.  As President of Look Forward Consulting (www.lookforwardconsulting.com) he has over nine years of experience with software development as a contributor, facilitator and leader.  He has been a Certified ScrumMaster since 2005 and is Certified Scrum Practitioner.