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AgileDC 2014: Four Great Workshops You Won't Want to Miss
If you are planning to attend AgileDC this year, please come by and join in on the four sessions being provided by Santeon’s coaches. Each of these will give you great insight into various aspects of agility. Here is some info on the sessions:
Andrea Chiou – 3 Techniques to Raise the Communication Bar on your Agile Team Workshop
Project success = f (listening, feedback, intentionality, practices)
To make your agile practices and processes come to fruition, you need to cultivate an environment that promotes listening, learning, inquisitiveness, intentionality and top notch feedback.
Agile projects succeed when there are frequent high-quality reinforcing feedback loops. I will share communication models based on Clean Language questions of David Grove and the Systemic Modeling techniques of Caitlin Walker that can greatly increase clarity, sense of purpose and listening skills within your team and collaborative endeavors. These include: Clean Questions, Clean Feedback, and Clean Setup.
This is a hands-on, try it out, concrete practice session.
David Kane – Making Movies and Software at the Speed of Thought! Workshop
Director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, El Mariachi, Sin City) is an Agile Director. He enjoys making highly creative movies quickly and cheaply. His ambition is to make movies at the speed of thought. To achieve this goal, he works in small teams to develop the ideas, visualize them quickly, shoot the movie fast, and build the movie in layers. This workshop will introduce Rodriguez's approach to film making by screening several of his 10 minute flick school featurettes and we will explore how these techniques translate to Agile software development in a lively group discussion.
George Paci – Keep Planning Tools out of Planning Meetings
Agile planning tools started simple: index cards, markers, and a table or wall. On many projects, for many reasons, these old stalwarts have been supplemented (or even replaced) by software solutions: Rally, VersionOne, Jira Agile, Trello, Trac, Scrumy, and literally dozens more, even BaseCamp. These tools have undeniable advantages over cardboard and ink in some aspects, but they're not superior in every situation.
This session will highlight the pitfalls of centering planning meetings around software tools—even the best ones, like [your ad here]—and make a badly-needed sales pitch for index cards on a wall (compensating for Oxford's oddly anemic marketing effort). You'll see how cards can make better use of your team's time and brainpower, promote parallelism in meetings, and increase engagement by all participants.
Paul Boos – Power of 13 Collaboration Game
So what does Collaboration really mean? It's just ensuring people understand what each other is doing right?
The Power of 13 Collaboration Game illustrates what true collaboration means. We'll do work by rolling dice over a 3 week Sprint. We'll then explore the results and start our next Sprint. In each Sprint, we're going to increase the participation across players and see what the effect is on productivity. Prepare to be surprised!
Should there be enough time remaining in the hour; we'll then specifically apply true collaboration to better understand the effects of pair programming by playing Pair Poetry. This simulates the power of pair programming and demonstrates why the one screen, one keyboard concept works.
And Don’t Forget...
In addition, come by the Santeon booth, try out one of our thoughtful questions exercises, discuss what is ailing your organization in our coaching corner, and/or join one of our coaches in one of the open sessions.