The Art of Building Consensus

Sam Kaner

Making high-quality, high-stake decisions in groups is not easy. Making them in cross-functional groups is even tougher. The diversity in the room breeds misunderstanding, confusion, and frustration. All too often these meetings end with predictably mediocre results – people either accept lowest-common-denominator compromises, or they punt the tough issues to a senior person, so s/he can make the real decisions later. In both cases, one is left wondering, “Why call such meetings in the first place?”

This morning’s keynote is a fascinating tour de force description of what it takes to build consensus in real-world cross-functional environments.

Sam Kaner, one of the world’s leading experts in multi-party collaboration, will share models and methods that have been used successfully at HP, Symantec, Electronic Arts, VISA, and hundreds of other organizations. You will walk away with powerful new insights and a set of tools you can use right away.

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Sam Kaner, Ph.D., has been an Organization Development practitioner for more than 25 years, and he has long been a specialist on consensus-building in groups. Sam has been named as “one of the world’s leading experts in collaboration” (Sandor Schuman, Ph.D., founding editor of Journal of Group Facilitation, and co-founder of International Association of Facilitators.) Sam’s classic bestseller, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey Bass), has gone through 16 printings and is now in its 2nd edition.

Sam has been a featured speaker at more than 40 professional conferences, and he has delivered keynote addresses on collaboration and group decision-making at the annual World Congress of Quality, the annual Asia Facilitators’ Conference, the annual world conference of the International Facilitators’ Association, The Association of Quality & Participation, and the annual Best in the West conference of the Organization Development Network. In 2005, AmericaWest Airlines named Sam as one of America’s Best Consultants. Since 1987 he has been Executive Director of Community At Work, a San Francisco-based consulting firm that specializes in designing and facilitating collaborative approaches to complex system change.

Quality Dynamics of Agile SW Development

Ron Jeffries & Chet Hendrickson

As Agile software proponents, we have spent much of our time explaining XP and Agile practices and why they make sense. Generally we talk about these things from a “supply side” viewpoint. We think about software development and how it works best, from the trenches.

Let’s focus on the “demand” side . Let’s look at the needs of those who pay for our software development. They need benefits, profit, information, and flexibility. It turns out that in order to provide what the business side needs, Agile and XP practices are not just helpful – they are almost essential.

Starting from a few simple and commonly held assumptions, we will explore the dynamic behavior of a software project, and will derive both management practices, and technical practices, as the inevitable consequences of setting out to do with what our business-side people need and want.

This keynote is a start at creating a unified theory of team-based software development, deriving the practices that are necessary in order to do software profitably and well. Our presentation will be based around a growing series of graphs and pictures illustrating what happens on a software project. Relationships between practices – what we do -and what happens – will be shown with both static and dynamic charts.

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Ron Jeffries is author of Extreme Programming Adventures in C#, the senior author of Extreme Programming Installed, and was the on-site XP coach for the original Extreme Programming project. Ron has been involved with Extreme Programming for over five years, presenting numerous talks and publishing papers on the topic. He is the proprietor of www.XProgramming.com, a well-known source of XP information. Ron was one of the creators, and a featured instructor in Object Mentor’s popular XP Immersion course. He is a well-known independent consultant in XP and Agile methods.

Ron has advanced degrees in mathematics and computer science, and has been a systems developer for more years than most of you have been alive. His teams have built operating systems, compilers, relational database systems, and a large range of applications. Ron’s software products have produced revenue of over half a billion dollars, and he wonders why he didn’t get any of it.

Chet Hendrickson was at the ground zero of Extreme Programming, the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation (C3) system. As a developer on the pre-XP C3, Chet saw how poor communication, inadequate testing, and an overly complex design can doom a development effort. He helped make the decision to throw away 14 months of work and begin again under the guidance of Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Ron Jeffries. Chet, along with Jim Haungs and Rich Garzaniti, in a talk at OOPSLA’97, was the first to report on the “Chrysler Methodology” as the term Extreme Programming had not yet been coined. Chet is an independent consultant, helping software teams improve the software development process by the application of XP’s core values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. His clients have ranged from federally charted quasi-public financial institutions to the developers of real-time petroleum exploration equipment. He is an author of Extreme Programming Installed. The book, the second in the Extreme Programming series, consists of a connected collection of essays, presented in the order the practices would actually be implemented during a project. He and Ron Jeffries are the proprietors of agilesoftwaredevelopment.org.