Agile 2008 is coming near
I’m glad I’m going to Agile 2008 in Toronto this year.
I’m glad Portia and I will present two sessions.
Mirror Mirror
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… Why Me? Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Kanban” is a mini-adventure of self-discovery to improve personal effectiveness. Think “Kaizen meets Agile Fairytales.”
Huh? What do a bunch of dwarves and an Evil Queen have to do with Agile? In this session you learn more about yourself, how you see others and how you can improve working with others. You learn to recognize the strengths of each (potential) team member. With the help of fairytale characters, you can create and maintain teams that play to the strengths of their members.
Why is this important? Software development is a team sport. I’ve been on some great teams. I’ve seen aligned teams in sports, theater and IT outperform non-aligned teams by a large margin. These two ingredients, efficient communication and playing to the strengths of members, were vital in each case.
Nine Boxes
“La technique d’interview des Neuf Cases pour mieux comprendre votre client” is a game where participants learn to perform structured interviews. The interview technique comes from the Solution Selling sales process. The Nine Boxes allows you to discover
- The real root causes of the problems your customer experiences
- Who is affected by the problem and how they are affected
- Co-create a vision of the future where the problem is solved
Huh? What does selling have to do with Agile? If we want to lead meaningful lives, we must attack the root causes of our customers’ problems. We must really understand the system. We must make all stakeholders enthusiastic about solving the problem, so that they will help bring about fundamental changes. We must give them back hope.
And then we can start writing user stories… IF AND ONLY IF software will help us to deal with the customer’s bottleneck.
See you there
I’m afraid to get lost in such a big conference, with so many sessions and so many people.
I’m glad I’ll be seeing friends inside and outside the agile world in Toronto.
