ScanAgile 2015 submissions are open!

Just a quick note today to let you know that the Call for Sessions for ScanAgile, the Agile Finland annual conference is open for submissions.

You can read the whole call for sessions here. You will find the submission form in that page as well.

For me the most interesting tracks are:

• Off-Piste: interesting lessons learned about being agile and agile related topics, from other industries 
• Black Piste: Topics for experienced agile practitioners

These are just some of the tracks. In Scan Agile there will also be tracks for those starting up or that have already started but are in the early phases of their Agile transformation journey. 

The Agile Finland Community is very active and has a long history of agile adoption and promotion. They have some of the most advanced practitioners in the world, so I am really looking forward to see who the Scan Agile team chooses for the 2015 lineup of the conference! 

Hope to see many of you there! 

LESS goes Stockholm for LESS2011, join us there in October

Last year I was involved in the organization of a unique conference. LESS2010 was a unique conference because it brought together different communities. We wanted to make sure that people with different points of view would discuss those points of view. The aim was to create a space for sharing ideas from different communities in the hope that new ideas would emerge. And emerge they did!

When the conference was done we had brought together the academic community which is involved in researching Agile adoption in the real world; the Agile community that is day-in-day-out applying Agile ideas in their own places of work; the Lean community and finally the Beyond Budgeting community that is sharing novel ways to manage and lead companies. This year we are doing the same, only better!

LESS goes Stockholm for LESS2011

You can check the details of the conference in the web-site, but here's a hint. We are working again on bringing different communities together!

The tracks that we have chosen are around the topics of Agile, Lean, Beyond Budgeting, Complexity Sciences, Systems Thinking and one topic that we deal with every day: Organization Transformation.

This year the trend is even more clear that LESS2011 is a conference for leaders in R&D organizations. Perhaps the only leadership focused conference in Europe at this point.

I do hope that more of these start happening because that's the next frontier for Agile and Lean adoption in our places of work.

So, I encourage you to submit a paper/session to the conference. Being there and talking to the the people with the experience and ideas is very important for us to continue our day-to-day work with new ideas and fresh energy!

See you in Stockholm!

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! :)

Agile Eastern Europe announced, I'll be visiting

It is now official, I'll be speaking at Agile Eastern Europe. Hope to see you there!

I'll be hosting a workshop and a talk. Both are about the business view of software development. One will be specifically about Agile:

• Business Agility. How to take advantage of an Agile R&D?
  
  Many companies have jumped on the Agile bandwagon. That's good, but what for? In this talk we explore the consequences and possible benefits of adopting Agile for your Business. It's not enough to benefit your R&D, we need to learn how Agile can help our whole company.
  

The other talk will be more generic, but about something that is critical for Agile teams: a workshop about creating a Vision that speaks to the team and can therefore guide the software development:

• Workshop "From an idea to a Vision you can implement"
  
  You've been there. You are tasked with implementing a product that someone else cooked up. What do do next? Follow the spec you say? Wrong!
  
  Developing a product without this Vision is not just waste, it is bad business for you and for your customer.
  
  Before we start implementing any product we must explore it's reason to exist, what customers it benefits and ultimately how it can help your customers (not you!) make money.
  
  In this workshop we will take an example and go through a simple process that helps us explore a product idea to the point that a spec is just a reference, but the product comes alive in the minds of the team members.
  

We have Open Space for learning at Scan-Agile

I've been in many conferences, and without an exception the best part of every conference was the time I had to talk 1-on-1 or with a few people about some subject that really interested me.

This normally started in the hallways, during the coffee breaks. We started talking and suddenly we realized that we had just missed the start of the sessions. The conversation would go on and eventually some of those would continue over dinner.

I've met more people during conferences this way than by any other method. Conferences are excellent for this. You have lots of people with the same interest in one place, start talking and before you know it you have found people with which you can discuss the most difficult problems you've faced. Sometimes others pitch in with a solution, sometimes you just get a bunch of friends that share the same interest.

This effect, of getting to know people you did not know before, is what we are trying to create in this year's Scandinavian Agile Conference. That's why we have an Open Space (aka Open Space Technology) day in our schedule. Open space is the format that allows for the best networking to happen.

In the Open Space anyone can suggest sessions in the morning's "marketplace of ideas". This means that those people are committed to host a 50-55 min session about a specific subject. That does not mean that they want to explain the subject. The best Open Space sessions I've been in are those where the host just asks a question and the conversation flows from that.

For those more technically inclined an Open Space session can be an opportunity to explain a hard technical problem you are facing and have others pitch in to help you solve it or explore possible solutions that you were not aware of.

The Open Space sessions where I've participated have all been excellent learning opportunities for me, but some have been breakthroughs! Most importantly, in each Open Space session where I have participated, I've been positively surprised how people that may be reluctant to participate at first, end up participating actively and having lots of fun in the process.

Come to the Open Space in Scan-Agile. Listen. Teach. Meet your community!

You can start building your Scan-Agile community today! Just go to Twitter and use the tag #scanagile. All of us on twitter will be able to find you and, who knows, maybe even create a joint-Open Space session before the actual Open Space day!

Come on, join the community!

Photo credit: Peter Kaminski @ flickr

Why learning is *still* so important (or why you should attend Scan-Agile '09)

Last year I wrote a very personal story about how learning made a huge difference in the life of two people of similar age and in a similar context.

Check out my story about Grandpa Tony and Grandpa Frank (BTW: it's a real story!).

So, this year I thought of finding a different way to talk about how important it is to learn continuously to ensure our best options to survive in our jobs.

I'll pick a few sessions from the Scan-Agile '09 conference to explain how you can actually use what you will learn in those sessions to improve your skills and your career.

Let's take the example of the workshop "Executable Requirements in Practice" hosted by Pekka, Juha and Janne. In this session you can learn about one of the most important practices in SW development today.

Making sure that you continuously develop software that meets needs that are identified throughout the life of a project is a basic success criteria. How do you do it practice? And how do you do it in a way that does not transform the test specialists into click-robots?

Executable Requirements is a simple term to describe what tests should cover in practice: Requirements. Executable because we need to be able to run those tests 100's of times in a typical project and people are not very good at doing the same thing 100's of times, therefore we need to have those in a executable form to be able to run them over and over again.

In this session Pekka, Janne and Juha will explain how they've actually done it! Not theory, but experience.

In many aspects their work is quite unique world-wide and we are very lucky to have them present this in Scan-Agile. Look-out for this "Executable Requirements" to become a trending topic in Agile circles and come to Scan-Agile '09 to learn all about it!

Check out the complete schedule here and register here.

Photo Credit: David Den @ Flickr

Turku Agile Day 09

Our friends in Turku are organizing their own Agile day. Check it out here.

Why learning is important (or why you should attend Scan-Agile '08). The story of grandpa Tony and grandpa Francis

I've come to realize lately that today's ability to learn is similar to last centuries ability to read. Confused?

Let me tell you a story.
One of my grandfathers (let's call him grandpa Francis) knew how to read, he was able to keep up with the latest developments in agriculture and even read the weather forecast in the newspaper -- a serious advantage in his time (early 20th century) over most people that depended on agriculture. My other grandfather (let's call him grandpa Tony) did not know how to read. Grandpa Tony could not keep up with latest advances except by word of mouth or (very much later on) by listening to the radio (and TV, even later).

Both grandpa Tony and grandpa Francis worked the land. They planted so they could collect and feed their families. What they could produce more (surplus) they could sell and buy other items such as  lighting oil, clothes and other ingredients they did not cultivate.

For them, yield and surplus were the name of the game. If they could collect more than they would consume they would become (so to speak) richer. Hence the importance of selecting the best plant breeds (such as potatoes, wheat, carrots, apples, etc. -- whatever grew in their climate).

Grandpa Francis was able to rent a farm and have therefore have access to better land, which in turn lead him to be able to have even more surplus. Grandpa Tony was not able to do so. They were both strong and hard-working men, both of them religious, both of them "good men" as they would say in those times. Both of them had a female first child and a male in the second birth -- an important economical factor in those times when work demanded hands and bodies. The only real difference was that grandpa Tony could not read, and grandpa Francis could.

Grandpa Francis would consult the farmers almanac for tips and hints of the latest developments. He was then able to choose the right plants to plant based on the most resistant and yielding seeds and was able to treat for certain diseases by learning about it from reading. Grandpa Tony had to rely on word of mouth and self-experimentation (not easy when you need to feed the family).

Grandpa Francis was able to rent a farm, to have a large(r) house and a larger family (more children = more wealth as families stuck together for long in those days).
Grandpa Tony did pretty well with his hard work and wild adventures (which should perhaps be a subject for another story), but -- critically -- grandpa Tony did not do as well as he could have done, had he known how to read.

What does this have to do with software? Good question, but there is a link. Today's factor in differentiating people's success in life is not reading, but something related: "wanting to read" or being able to learn.

Many people today go through their lives without reading so much as one book per year. That in effect prevents them from accessing knowledge that could transform their lives.

In Agile Finland ry, we are trying to combat that lack of learning by creating opportunities for learning, this year we are putting together the Scandinavian-Agile '08 conference. In this conference you will have the opportunity, not only to learn from the top-notch speakers, but also to network with like minded people and learn from their experiences also.

I'd say that this is an opportunity you should not miss!

Check out our web-site, and register ASAP. We expect a full house and seats are already flying!

Come and learn!