Designing the best Process for your Team

Michael Keeling

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

The 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 behavior. 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 affordance-driven process improvement before diving into a collaborative workshop.

During the workshop teams will get a chance to put theory to practice and apply design and ideation methods to agree on team values as well as to brainstorm practices that will help them promote those values and trigger the right behaviors. Teams can directly apply the concepts and methods taught in this workshop to their team retrospectives and any other process improvement initiatives.

Short Bio

Michael Keeling is a professional software engineer with over eight years of development experience, currently working at IBM. As an applications engineer, he helps optimize organizations’ access to information by designing and configuring enterprise search solutions. Prior to this, he filled a few software development roles including a systems analyst for Black Knight Technology for five years. He has a BS in computer science from the College of William and Mary and a Master’s in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Michaels interests include the pragmatic application of software engineering methods, software architecture and design, and the human aspects of software engineering.