On 25-26 of March I took part in #AgileDays Conference, which has been held annually for 15 years. This event brings together people from different cities and countries who share their experience: ups, downs and best practices. I’d like to thank ScrumTrek for the opportunity to take part in it. It was amazing! Today I’ll tell you a little about it.
The first day, 25th of March, was the day of talks, reports. Everyone could ask the speakers to answer the questions. This year Kent Beck participated in #AgileDays. He is a software engineer and the creator of extreme programming and one of the 17 original signatories of the #AgileManifesto. Kent spoke about what Extreme Programming brings to Scrum Teams. Rather interesting, I will see his report one more time later.
Joe Justice, the author of Extreme Manufacturing, also presented his report. He spoke about the advantages and disadvantages of using Agile approaches in production, what steps are required to implement Agile approaches in an enterprise. Joe is a TEDx speaker, guest lecturer at both MIT and Oxford University in England, cited in more than 6 business paperbacks and hardcovers, the subject of a Discovery Channel mini-documentary for his work creating the disciplines Extreme Manufacturing, Scrum@Hardware, and The Justice Method. So his speech was vivid and full of practical cases and pieces of advice.
There were a lot of reports, they covered 10 topics on Agile methodologies. It was impossible to listen to all of them in one day. But for the participants there is an opportunity to watch the recording of reports later.
The second day, 26th of March, was the day of workshops. I participated in the workshops. Each workshop lasted for 2 hours. By the end of the day I was very tired but happy.
The first workshop was about designing effective team meetings and sessions by Ludmila Dudorova. Some team leaders, scrum masters and agile coaches hold productive team meetings, fast, with a high contribution of participants, while others get bored, protracted, monotonous. Much depends on the teamwork process. And during this workshop I had the practice how to built the effective process, I learned methods for it.
The second workshop was how to design and run retrospective games by Valentina Korochina. This workshop was for those who see the value of playful forms of working with teams, who are tired of carrying out someone else’s and want to come up with their own. In 2 hours we played the game, mastered the basic algorithm for creating games for the team, came up with several new games and presented them to all participants.
The third workshop was the most difficult and interesting by Alexey Pikulev. It was dedicated to how to turn trust into a driver of organizational change. We talked wether can the trust help to solve the problems of organizational change or not. Is it possible to overcome resistance to change through trust in the organization? And why all modern practices based on self-government do not work without it. Alexey gave us the cases and worked them out in groups and then presented the solutions.
There were so many interesting and amazing thing during the conference. I am very glad that I could participate and got new experience, knowledge, learnd new people.
What do you think of such conferences? Are they useful? Do you take part in them? Please share your thoughts with me in LinkedIn, I would like to discuss it with you.
