xpday « Thinking for a Change

Nov

XP Day Benelux – 2

Preparing for XP Days Benelux

Thursday, the XP Days Benelux start. The first sessions start at 10:00; the conference organisation is about done by then. Once the conference gets going, there’s not a lot of work for the organisers. From then on, the session presenters and participants have to do their bit. We’re not kidding when we say that “the focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone”.

Bigger and better than ever before

At least it’s bigger than before. The number of participants has grown steadily from 85 in the first year to more than 150 this year. We’ve always set a cap on the number of participants: 30 participants per track. That (plus or minus 10) is about the number of participants with whom you can have really interactive session.

Better?

We’ll know from the retrospective if we’ve improved on last year.

See you there

Or if you can’t be there, follow the conference via the FriendFeed XP Days Benelux room or read our presenter and attendees’ blogs.

More later.

Oct

Business Value Game v1.1 on tour

Agile Holland Conference

The Agile Holland group organizes their first one day conference on October 24th in Amsterdam.

Vera and I will present the Business Value Game v1.1, which incorporates the feedback we got from participants at tryouts at Agile 2008, the XP user group meeting, Brain Train and Agile Business Conference.

Scandinavian Agile Conference

Agile Finland organizes the Scandinavian Agile Conference on October 29th in Helsinki.

I will present the Business Value Game with some Finnish coaches at the conference.

XP Days Benelux

The XP Days Benelux conference on November 20th and 21st in Eindhoven also features the Business Value Game, this time presented with Vera and Portia.

<Your company>, <Your usergroup>

Do you want to learn about “Business Value”, prioritising your backlog, portfolio management and all the challenges that salespeople and account managers face daily? Do you want to experience the benefits of working with short iterations and releasing early? Do you want have fun while you learn? Download the Business Value Game, print the cards and organise your own game.

The Business Value Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Oct

Where do they come from?

Where do participants to XP Days Benelux come from?

Places are filling up nicely for the upcoming XP Days Benelux on 20-21 November. It looks like we’ll have another sold out conference.

The XP Days started as a local conference, to enable participants to get a taste of Agile without having to travel too far. We always attracted a good mix of local and foreign presenters. Local presenters bring stories that are recognisable to the audience. Foreign presenters bring in new ideas and techniques.

As you can see from the table, three quarters of the presenters are Belgian or Dutch. The other presenters come from 7 countries.

Belgium	24
The Netherlands	19
France	6
Finland	3
Great Britain	2
United States	1
Germany	1
Italy	1
Switzerland	1

The geographical distribution of participants is even more marked: 85% of all participants come from Belgium (45%) or The Netherlands (40%). The other participants come from the seven countries mentioned before, plus Sweden.

But where are the Luxemburgers?

Aug

XP Days 2008 program published

It’s finally DONE!

The Program for XP Days Benelux 2008 has just been published. It’s DONE.

At least… iteration one of the program is done. More details will be published in the following days.

Below you can see the sheets and cards I described earlier.

I think this is yet another strong program that will provide participants with lots of useful information, experience and food for thought.

I hope to see you (again) at the conference.

Aug

XP Days Benelux 2008 – Program selection

The XP Days Benelux 2008 program: almost done

When we coach teams we repeat ad nauseam: “Almost Done is Not Done”. So, the XP Days Benelux program is not yet done. The program will be published once we finish sending out notifications of acceptance and rejection.

We had a lot more session proposals than in previous years. There’s clearly a lot of interest and a lot of experience with Agile methods in our two small countries. Thanks to our cooperative session improvement process, most proposals are of a high enough standard to be included in the program. That makes the job of the Program Committee hard. Because of there’s so much interest, we decided to increase the number of tracks from 4 to 5.

Conference program recipe

Like in previous years, we have to create a program that satisfies a lot of constraints. The recipe is quite simple.

Ingredients: a bunch of sessions on index cards, two big sheets with the session slots, an initial estimate of value for each session and a small group of agilists.

Use the index card to make a lot of information about the session visible at a glance: subject, type of session, how much experience we expect from participants… The size of the card indicates the length of the session
Sort the index cards by estimated value. Each session submitter could vote for their Top-10 sessions.
Put the top ranked sessions in fitting slots on the program until all slots are taken.
When a constraint is violated, exchange a session card with another session card on or off the program.
Repeat step 4 until satisfied

The process looks a bit chaotic at first, but it converges each time. We end up with a program for a conference we want to go to and where we want to invite our colleagues and customers. That’s one of our acceptance tests.

Just a bit more patience, it’s 90% done

You’ll get to see the XP Days program soon. Watch this space. But first, we have to send more acceptance and, unfortunately, rejection messages. And rejection’s tough to take.

After the program was settled, we discussed other fun stuff to do at the XP Days conference. We’re going to try some new things this year. Participants will decide if we’re successful. Participants can verify if we’ve taken last year’s feedback into account.

See you in Eindhoven on 20 and 21 November!

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