Kicking up dust for the Agile Finland 2011-2012 season

A big moment for the Agile Finland community is approaching. On May 25th we’ll get together and select the new Agile Finland Board for the 2011-2012 season.

There are many reasons why it is a big moment. In my opinion it is a big point in our history as a community. Agile Finland was started when Agile was still the ghetto, now Agile is not only out of the ghetto, but it is becoming the dominant software development approach in Finland. Sure, many companies are still going old-skool with their software projects, massively outsourcing the testing function or trying to get huge changes in before releasing a single version, etc. But Agile Software Development is, unmistakably the dominant approach in software development in Finland today.

This leads to an important point for our community. We started Agile Finland as a way to spread knowledge of Agile and support the learning journey that we’ve all been through since 2000. That phase is over. Although we do need to continue to support the spreading of the knowledge about Agile to other communities (like in this example), I feel that this does not need to be our main focus anymore. So I’d like to propose a new focus, a new phase for our growing community.

Concrete proposals for the next Agile Finland Board season

I propose that the next Agile Finland board should focus on helping the community share, expand and develop new knowledge in the field of Software Development and Product Development with focus on some key areas of practice. For this I propose the following structure in the Agile Finland activities for the next year:

• Agile Finland must define what areas of focus it will have (see suggestion below) and arrange specific activities that emphasize those areas of focus. For that I propose the following areas:
  
• Programming and testing in an Agile Software Development environment. This area of focus would cover the technical development of our community in programming and testing tasks. The Software Craftsmanship movement is a good source of inspiration for the content to be shared and developed in this area, but we also need to create an atmosphere of cooperation and sharing with the excellent testing professionals we have in Finland and in the AF community. The technical area of focus is an area where there is clearly a need for a better offering in our community, and Agile Finland has the network and expertise to start that work.
  
• Project Management in an Agile Software Development environment. This area of focus would cover the Project concept, it’s applicability to different types of work and product development environments. We know that the traditional Project Management is not compatible with many Software Development environments, but we need to explore alternatives, share and expand our knowledge on what has worked in the past as well as the experiments that are going on right now. In this area of focus, I believe we must build a bridge with the already active Project Management communities(PMI, PRY). We have a lot to learn from each other.
  
• Leadership and Management. This area of focus was already in the activities started during last year (see ACLA), but we need to continue to develop those activities. Many of the challenges we face today are because the traditional leadership and management models have failed in the era of knowledge work (like software and other areas). We need to share what is being tested in the world, bring in some world-class thought leaders in this area to enlarge the pool of knowledge for managers and leaders in our local community.
  

Conclusion

By focusing on these three areas (Programming and Testing, Project Management, Leadership and Management) I am suggesting that Agile Finland should also focus on specific activities for it’s major interest groups. It is not enough to arrange one to three generic networking events during the year, we need to start taking concrete actions for the development of our community. I hope that this post contributes to a discussion around how we could do that.


Photo credit: Patrick Keogh @ flickr

Short multimedia review of LESS 2010 conference

The LESS 2010 conference just ended on a positive note of shared knowledge, bridge building between different communities and celebration of great work in the area of Software Development.

LESS was started with a great ambition of combining, from the starting point three different communities globally. Those communities were the Agile community, which is focused on the improvement of the software industry. The Lean community with both people from manufacturing as well as from software industry. And the Beyond Budgeting community, which comes from large financial and industrial companies and represents a turn in the way those companies tackle the problem of managing large organizations.

I hope that you have the chance to dive into each of these communities' body of knowledge as there are great contributions from each of those complementing what we have been doing in the Agile community for nearly a decade.

There was one piece of data that particularly impressed me. That data does emphasize something that many of us have felt, but putting a number on it does make it even more impressive. The first keynote presented a figure from an evaluation of work done in a company. The amount of tasks that were blocked (could not progress) was 62%. This is amazing, most of the work in that company was blocked, and so people would start new tasks and, guess what: get blocked on those. The queuing theory's prediction of "the more tasks you start the less you finish" was quite clear here.

There was one talk and one paper that were highlighted by the organizers as the best in the conference. These selections are always subjective, of course. But it's worth highlighting them as they were very good sources of information about Agile adoption (the paper) and new ways of looking at the organization and inform the way we adopt Agile and Lean software development (the talk).

Maarit Laanti received the award for the best paper of the conference. Here's Maarit receiving the award.

Paper: Agile Transformation Study at Nokia - One Year After

Here's Maarit receiving the award:
UPDATE: This video has been removed


Jurgen Appelo received the award for best talk in the conference. His talk: "Complexity vs. Lean, the Big Showdown". You can find Jurgen's slides here.

Here's Jurgen receiving his award:

Jurgen Appelo receiving award for best presentation at LESS2010 from Vasco Duarte on Vimeo.

Finally the conference ended with the gala dinner, which I thought was a wonderful way to end the event where we meet so many new people. We celebrate the fact that we spent time together trying to understand the issues that we face every day, but with the help of different points of view and mental frameworks.

Very good 3 days. I'm already looking forward for next year's conference!

PS: Watch this space as I'll publish an amazing surprise that the LESS2010 organizers prepared for the participants! :)