This week I had the pleasure of facilitating an ensemble programming session for a quartet. It was their first time working in this way but they’d heard it might be worth trying. The knowledge gaps between the participants could not have been larger: highly experienced through to apprentice.
On Tuesday, in the first 30 mins they learned
- the roles: typist, navigator, support (and facilitator)
- the timing: 5 minute rotations and a break every full cycle
- patience to talk to each other and really listen to each other
- slowing down to the slowest speed was good to share knowledge
After that they wanted to try it for a full morning.
After the morning session they said they could see the real value of using ensemble working to bring everyone up to speed quicker: apprentices, new starters and late joiners to projects already in flight.
They spotted and fixed a number of bugs that had been missed before; scouts rules we naturally brought into play.
The apprentice had asked more questions, and had been able to play as navigator for the first time; this was a massive confidence boost.
On Thursday, the team retro was full of positive comments about the experience.
On Friday, one of the quartet asked me for the link to the tool I’d been using to keep track of rotations and timing. They want to run more sessions like this themselves, not all the time, but at least several a week. I couldn’t be happier.