Agile2014 - Soft Skill Presentations

Three of my favorite presentations at Agile2014 were on soft skills; Diana Larsen’s Best Job Ever, Lyssa Adkin’s Facilitating Intense Conversations, and Jean Tabaka/Em Campbell-Pretty’s Creating Agile Tribes

Diana Larsen was the keynote presenter on Wednesday. After a bit of dancing, she got to the presentation. She had three main points

• Do Work you Love to Do
• Work With Purpose
• Take Care of you Tribe

The message was that we don’t have to do a job we hate. Hard work can be rewarding, but there has to be a purpose behind it. 

Lyssa Adkins presentation was about facilitation when there is conflict. Her talk started out more like a discussion on Buddhist practices; things like meditation and mindfulness. Her discussion was based on the facilitation techniques of Diane Musho Hamilton. As part of the presentation, she brought 6 people up on stage and facilitated a discussion among them and demonstrated a number of facilitation techniques such as creating safety, reframing, and listening fully. 

The third presentation was based on the book Tribal Leadership by David Logan and both presenters talked about work environment built around some of the ideas in the book and the positive impact that had on the workers. The presentation wrapped up with the attendees making t-shirts of our tribe.

Agile2014 - Day 1

Yesterday was the first full day of Agile2014. In general it was a pretty good day.

The original keynote speaker, Aneesh Chopra, apparently had to cancel. His replacement, Sam Guckenheimer, provided an overview of Microsoft's journey to agile. It was an ok case study with some interesting information, but it wasn't a motivational keynote to get us all charged up. Talking to some of the organizers later, I found out they made a conscious decision not to pay for a headliner keynote speaker.

One of the more interesting talks was with Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson in which they took questions from the audience. Everything from is TDD dead? (it isn't) to budgeting around technical debt. Ron and Chet showed their extensive years of experience. One point they hit on is that agile is really about the team figuring it out. The team has to own the process and make it work for them. Using something like a formal Scrum approach should only be your starting point.

Mike Cottmeyer did a good presentation on why agile adoption fails. He has a nice write-up on his website here and posted the slides here.

The last presentation I attended was with Jesse Fewell and Dana Wright. They walked us through a more engaging way to prepare for meetings & events based on Dana's book.

On the exhibit floor was the usual group of vendors, mostly tool vendors. Automating testing and continuous integration were big...and DevOps was being thrown around alot. I was reminded that Agile is a software conference, not a project management conference like PMI's Global Congress so the focus was really on software development.