Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Learning Outside the Box

I'm on the blog team for the PMI Netherlands Summit, taking place June 13th in Zeist - The Netherlands. One of the tracks is Learning from Outside the Box. I appreciate the aspect this track is taking. Sometimes you can learn valuable lessons when you get outside your normal area of focus.

I recently spoke at a conference in the US that focused on health care, the HIMSS conference in New Orleans back in March. Some of the attendees of my session were familiar with agile, but many were not and based on my audience, agile was not being used much in healthcare. For them, this was a learning outside the box experience, but also for me.

I have not done any projects in the healthcare field. I learned something about the field based on the questions my audience was asking. It has peaked my curiosity and I've started researching the types of projects that this industry deals with and started thinking about how agile can support this field.

So if you're in the EMEA region and looking for a good conference, check out the PMI Netherlands Summit. There are some strong speakers such as Dr Lynn Crawford and Dr Terry Cooke-Davies and a lot of interesting topics.