It’s become a bit of a tradition for Nigel and I to write some reflections after the annual Agile Australia conference. This year Nigel was stuck at home in Melbourne, so it’s just down to me.
I felt like the conversation was much more sophisticated this year. Lots of people talking about Agile and Lean in the same sentence. Lots of folks grappling with their whole end to end program, budget cycle and corporate cultures. A recognition that iterative test and learn approaches are the future no matter what your size or market position. After many years focusing on techniques, frameworks and patterns this year there was a new focus on values, culture and the human element.
5 years ago the conversation was basically: can this agile stuff even really work ? Now it feels like a whole new breed of people are wanting to understand and embrace Agile, and it feels much less cynical and defensive on their part this time. This is a promising evolution though it does mean I’m going to have to stop making jokes about a few companies like Telstra who have not only seen the light but are working bloody hard to change their course.
A couple of conference highlights for me:
Dave Snowdon – Cognitive Edge – Smart grouchy man; he hurt everyone’s brains… Understanding how we humans think and process information is really important. Something Dave and his team are exploring is the idea of capturing what users want or are experiencing through micro narratives. Stories. If you want to know what your company is really like ask someone the story they would tell their best friend.
Ryan Martens – Rally Softare – An elegant and heartfelt call to action for engineers to think about how they can use their powers for good and not evil. The world has many big and complex problems and if we can combine basic human empathy with our engineering chops and the scientific method, then maybe, just maybe we can make the world a better place. Seeing an MRI machine turned into a pirate ship so that kids wouldn’t be so scared to go into it was a beautiful example of empathetic insight.
The reception for my own talk about applying Agile, Lean and Systems Thinking approaches to a small Australian high-end bike manufacturer was very gratifying too. I’m not sure if the session was videoed, but I promise I’ll write about the story here soon for the people who missed it. For anyone interested in seeing BAUM’s transformation in person just get in contact and I’m sure we can organise a field trip to Geelong.
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