I love going to the Agile conference every year because I learn so much in such a short time. There are so many people achieving tremendous results using Agile – so many people trying new things and sharing their knowledge.
I wanted to originally share a blog post each day. Unfortunately, it has been so busy, I haven’t been able to do that. But here is a summary of the days so far.
Agile Day 1
The conference kicked-off with the opening keynote by Luke Hohmann of Conteneo. Luke is always an inspiring speaker and sparkles when he talks about using games to solve problems.
He showed us how Agile thinking – especially collaborative games for learning – can be reworked slightly to achieve goals outside software development in areas like government, psychology/therapy, and more.
He shared his experience with the City of San Jose and their annual games over the past 3-4 years and how they were able to involve more community member perspectives in budgeting decisions. He also talked about the Los Altos School District and their experience with games to make difficult decisions about over-crowded classrooms – and again, including more people into the decision.
He showed an app to help with collecting decisions and helping to come to consensus for large-scale games – multiple teams of 8. So many teams, there needs to be a heat map to help communicate trends.
At lunch I was talking with a new friend I met at the conference who mentioned that games like this could eventually be used by us to manage government and asked a radical, but true, question – Do we really need a legislature if we could accomplish something similar thru games?
Something to ponder. How awesome would that be if everyone were collaborating using games in that way!
Will presented a lot of theory and information about experimentation – how to define a good experiment, what to expect from it, and how to know if you succeeded. Lots of guidance for what to do or avoid.
Then we had lunch.
After lunch, I learned a valuable lesson about Agile 2015: Get to your sessions early! They book up quick! I think I wandered to 4 different talks that were full until I gave up.
So I decided to visit the vendors.
I saw the new Mingle demo. It was great to see how a program manager can have visibility into Agile projects from the top down and the team can view a project from the bottom up thru stories. There are more ways to help the teams have visibility into roadblocks or challenges, workloads, and understand what's happening where. They have done some great work with their app – I can't wait to play with the demo site!I also visited Axosoft, which is a great tool that is a little like Trello. It also allows someone the ability to give bug tracking access to customers. This is great for custom app firms or even companies that are getting a product off the ground and value customer input. I want to get in and explore that tool a little more. It has a lot of functionality, but not overwhelming with features.Leankit is a great for organizations that value quick visual summaries of their projects. If your company loves Kanban boards – this is for you! They support Agile and Waterfall, but they are about making the presentation super simple and straight-forward. I need to get a full demo when I get home.Workfront is perfect for mixed waterfall and Agile environments. This seems to be the trend as enterprises are adopting Agile – change is hard, and it's hard to let go of the known process. I look forward to talking with them further.
I think it's great that the vendors are open to how enterprises and companies are using Agile. It's also wonderful to see such diversity for products – there are so many ways to work, and now there are many tools to support those different approaches and processes.
Flexibility is key for change, which leads me to the next talk by Esther Derby.
I attended Esther Derby's session – engaging and fascinating as always!
Her perspective on change resonated with me and my experiences – change just can’t happen overnight, and Agile needs to be flexible enough to allow for iterated change. It's funny – organizations need to change but there are so many things happening that needs to be adjusted.
And she communicated so much in just a handful of slides and 6 rules. I love her stories and how she integrates them into the session. It was wonderful!
Agile Day 2
I LOVED this session. I think it’s important for a product owner to have a strong vision about what the product should be, how the product will stand in the market, and be able to prioritize features and stories to that vision.
Alan presented a framework and tools for product owners to get that vision and have a way to help them prioritize their work. He also mapped how risk drives a lot of decisions in enterprises (something many Agile startups don’t face and have a hard time understanding). Some systems just can’t be integrated into an app development team because they are so central to the enterprise/business.
He also included a way for the business to create light personas to help define products. Sure, personas should be researched and validated with customers, but at least the business will start thinking about the users. It's a start – an important start – to include customer perspective and empathy.
I can’t wait to review the slides for this talk! It was stellar!
The premise of this session is that UX can actively contribute to project innovation in Agile environments – and it's easy to do. For the workshop, we spent some time interviewing each other and then sketching some solutions, being encouraged to think differently about a problem and solution. Mainly, we were being encouraged to get new ideas.
I enjoyed this speaker’s speaking style and what he was presenting. I also liked how he defined UX as creating something the users didn’t know they needed. That's true innovation.
This one shifted many of my perspectives of people and situations. Sure, we know about the primal brain, the emotional brain, and the executive brain, but how do you shift between them? And how can you – and your team – stay in the executive brain more often?
I often listen to spiritual masters discuss how to change behaviors and imprints and find a way to live in that executive brain. What I liked about Sarah's presentation was that she described a similar process outside of a spiritual context, which could help in work situations. The workshop during the session gave us hands-on experience using these methods. I feel I can use this now when working with anyone – as well as to help myself be in the executive brain area more frequently and not let certain circumstances or imprinted emotional responses get in my way of work.
Fantastic session! Definitely get the slide deck. I hope someone recorded it.
After all of the mental inputs of the day, I wanted to shift the focus of my brain a little bit – so I decided to see how games could be used for learning. This was the perfect ending to the day!
Some of what we learned through the games:
- What makes a great manager/leader (hint: not micromanaging)
- How change impacts people for the good or bad and what makes it easier to swallow
- What are good stories/requirements
- How changing requirements can be confusing – and difficult to process
It was all hands-on, activity-based, physical learning. I can’t wait to use some of this with clients!
I need to check out the tastycupcake.org site now for other methods like this. What a great icebreaker for a full-day meeting!
And now on the Day 3, 4 and 5. I can’t wait to uncover what will happen today!