It’s been an honor to participate in the Agile by Example conference in Warsaw, Poland. Thanks to Piotr Burdylo and Lukasz Szostek and more for putting on a fantastic conference.
On Monday I had the great privilege to attend a dojo session offered by Niels Malotaux. Results Management and Evo Planning are topics that all professionals committed to delivering the best value should know. Niels is one of the best, if not the best, master of teaching both. He’s also a good friend from #Gilbfest 2015 in London earlier this year. You can tell from the photo below that it was a happy reunion. Niels sets a fantastic example for all practitioners of knowledge delivery to follow. Check out his site with detailed links to all of his content. He truly cares about the learning, and application of the learning, by his students.
The full conference started Tuesday, and was full of opportunities to listen, learn, connect, and share, the four essentials of a good conference. You can review the highlights of the conference content via reviewing my twitter feed or checking the larger #abe15 tweet stream. Thanks to those who stopped by my Ask the Expert sessions (that title will never stop being odd to me) and who connected with me via twitter or in the hallways of the conference venue.
My speech on Tuesday afternoon was well received (Whew!) yet definitely different than other presentations. I’ll admit that I enjoy being the odd one at these Agile conferences. It’s a great community to be a part of and I’m glad to call so many in the community my friends. Those of you who follow this blog will know the essentials of the content I covered, driving people versus driving change, power curves, policy buffer, and the courage to take first steps towards a new way of choosing change. I even started with the story of cargo cult, one of the first stories I covered at this blog over five years ago.
I also participated in the lightning talks at the end of Tuesday’s session. These talks are five minute bursts on topics of interest to whomever at the conference would like to jump up and speak. I’d alluded to the playground project in my talk, but not covered it directly, so I thought why not jump up and give a quick five picture story about how change agents can make a difference in their communities too. It was well received, motivating some in the audience to ponder their participation in their communities (or so they told me in conversations afterwards). I felt compelled to share given some conversations I’d had the night before where some had mentioned a tendency to not get involved in the larger community affairs. You know I can stay captured in an organization, so I thought, “why not help them see how they can serve and achieve too?” Here are the five photos I used.
Wednesday was a more relaxed day, if only because I didn’t have a solo presentation to deliver. I was delighted to be surrounded by fantastic coworkers. They truly care about the future of the organization and are willing to apply their best efforts to get us there. They’re also involved in delivering conferences, so they were there to learn on many levels. You can tell from the smiles on our faces that work for is not a chore. Yes, we are in a movie theater, but that was the conference venue, so we were where we were supposed to be.
The conference ended for me with participation on a four-person panel on Agile transformations. All conference sessions will soon be on YouTube, so I’ll post the link as soon as I have it if you’re interested in seeing all that you missed.
Thank you again to the organizers for inviting me to be a part of an excellent conference. The Polish agile community is vibrant, welcoming, and curious. I couldn’t ask for more. Dziękuję!