Agile 2009: Day 1 – Planning

The conference looks set to get off to a great start with plenty of Real Options on Day 1! Here’s a shortlist of the sessions I’m most curious about. Emboldened session titles indicate my current first choice per timeslot. Putting The Law of Two Feet into practice is always a Real Option, too!

Monday – 24 August 2009

Morning:

• 11:00 – 12:30 – The Agile Playground with Tobias Mayer because it’s a chance to share our games and get new ideas for applying Agile. Pascal, Vera and I already share our games on www.agilecoach.net.
• 11:00 – 12:30 – Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule with Mary Poppendieck because I’ll learn ways to communicate and deal with a common problem in project planning in order to better manage projects.
• 11:00 – 12:30 – Developing Agile Leaders and Teams: A Developmental & Transformational Path with Gilles Brouillette because I’ll get a roadmap for showing how people can develop their Agile skills as individuals and team members.

Afternoon:

• 14:00-17:30 – Creating Agile Simulations and Games for Coaches and Consultants with Elisabeth Hendrickson and Chris Sims because I love creating games to help myself and others learn more effectively.
• 14:00-14:45 – New Approaches to Risk Management with David Anderson because I want to learn about new ways of managing risks to give the projects I work on the best chance of successful delivery.
• 14:00-14:45 – Software Development for Disney Animated Feature Film Production by Rajesh Sharma and Brian Wherry because I want to see what happens when Art and Technology come together when Disney develops software to produce its feature films.
• Accidental Adoption – The Story of Scrum at Amazon.com with Alan Atlas because I want to hear about how Amazon adopted Scrum.
• 14:00-15:30 – Advances in Release Planning by Jim Highsmith because I want to learn new techniques and get ideas to get more value out of Release Planning.
• 14:00-15:30 – An introduction to Agile Through the Theory of Constraints because it’ll provide the basic theory behind The Bottleneck Game (a simulation of how to apply the 5 focusing steps from the Theory of Constraints) which Pascal and I’ll be facilitating on Wednesday morning.
• 16:00-16:45 – Giving and receiving effective feedback by Liz Keogh because I can never get enough practice on giving and receiving feedback and, most important of all, taking action from feedback.
• 16:00-17:30 – Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield with George Schlitz and Giora Morein because I want to find out how others define Agile Enablement and how it can be compared to a ‘battlefield’.
• 16:00-17:30 – Team Start-up: one of the first Agile Adoption activities by Lyssa Adkins because different coaches have different approaches for introducing a team to Agile.