Agile Ísland 2012 conference was yesterday and I really enjoyed it. Good planning, great people, interesting discussions, good food, inspirational speakers, beer and the whole atmosphere was really good.
There were two lines: people and tech, I took all the lectures in the first one and here are some points I jotted down…but some are just reminders for me and maybe not that useful for others 😉
Let’s Help Melly, Changing Work Into Life (Jurgen Appelo)
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Great to get a excerpt from the MGMT3.0 course. Talked about how different models are getting us into better management and Agile is one step we’re talking. Jurgen knows what he’s doing and does his job well.
- At one point he stepped down (of the small 30 cm stage) and walked around and when to the people he got to help him with an example, I liked that gesture to connect better with the audience.
- Innovating (and introducing) solutions is all about having fun and creating your „own“ stuff.
- System thinking: Anticipate, adapt & explore. Agile isn’t focused on exploring, at least XP has spikes. (Steal & tweak, develop models in collaboration, shorten the feedback cycle)
- Mgmt is too important to leave it to the managers!
- Everybody should be involved in mgmt (dance)
- Marty…encourage & foster innovation (play&fun)
- Daily happiness index wall – showed an image from a company with daily measurements of people happiness…
Product Ownership over Product Owners (David Hussman)
As soon as David started talking I felt how much he knew and how talented he was, maybe because he’s also a musician in a rock band…and one of the first things he said was „Don’t talk about things you don’t do“ 😉
- Get people togeather and talking/sharing
- Dude’s law: Value = How/Why (people tend to get stuck on why)
- Add a Valuable column at the end of the scrum/kanban wall to measure value
- Root cause -> people don’t like each other (no collaboration)
- Value thinking vs. estimation
- Building the right „it“
- Check out Story mapping and paths
- CardBoard – David is working on cardboardit.com with Jeff Patton
Tearing Down Walls – Using Kanban to Improve Flow from Marketing to Production (Mattias Skarin)
- No center control – what comes out is decided when working…exciters must be included (exciters = nice to have, the „wow“ items)
- Should we stop estimating? SML stories all too similar lead time…
- Release checklist for each release…
- Idea (item/feature) owner sees the idea through…
Culture Hacking (Daði Ingólfsson & Pétur Orri Sæmundsen)
- What is culture? Good question followed with an exercise…I ended with „habit in communication“…and they explained culture as „norm“.
- In a team it’s all about knowing: how will we work together, who am I, what is in it for me, what are our colltive tasks, what do I bring to the table.
- Core principles (Jim) – Personal alignment (what do you want)
- Ask for help
I really liked that they talked about the history of their company (Sprettur) how they had hacked it’s culture 😉
Coaching is More Than Telling People What to Do (David Hussman)
- Least amount of process that gives tangible results (convert the sceptics)
- How do you build software? Strengths / Challenges? Why change? What is stopping you?
- Team vs. Family? You protect your family at any cost…
- „A new person that shows up is thrown into the agile river“
- Practice | Value | Example | Constraints
Open space
- Do the first thing that gives me the most
- Coaching: ask 1 worst possible outcome and best imaginable outcome…
- This is Your brain on music
- NLP in 21 days
- „Skrum“
The most reoccurring or interesting subjects I found standing out were:
- Should we stop estimating?
- Be value driven
- Check out Dave Snowden (at least 3 of the speakers were pointing to his work)
I had a lof of fun with great people and take a lot with me from this day =)
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