FlexFlow - Flexible Thoughts for a Complex World

XPDays Benelux - 23/24.11.2009

For various reasons since a few years ago Benelux was more an intermediate stop on a business trip rather than a real destination, but recently this has changed: after the Agile Open Holland in Baarn, about which I already wrote, I went again to that part of the world for an agile event: XPDays Benelux in Mechelen.

Once again the impression is that agile is very mature here and that the agilists are also walking their talks: in the two days I was there I spoke with many very knowledgeable people and the level of their contributions to the conference, be it in formal presentations or in workshops or simply in the talks during the breaks, was remarkable.

The concept of the conference was to mix hands-on programming sessions, workshops on the various aspects of agility and formal presentations, also in quite some quantity: with five parallels tracks there was always something good going on, also for all tastes, and several times I had difficulties in deciding where to go.

Highlights? Well, several: from what you can learn when your house burns down (slides) to how to create leaderful teams to tools to coach product owners - the "black hole" of Scrum for how its definition is incomplete. There were also several other very interesting sessions that were rated very well by the participants.

I was also presenting my session on how to use solution focused techniques in agile coaching (slides - I will write about it in a follow-up post).

On the top of some great content, also the setup of the conference was great: the conference centre was very modern and fully equipped and the organisers went those extra miles in finding ways to keep things interesting, from a 30-seconds elevator pitch for each session before the start of day to a participants’ feedback session at the end of the day, to a games evening on Monday that really pulled the people together. A framework for organising on-demand sessions - called Birds of a Feather - helped to continue discussing a subject after the relevant conference slot was over. Overall I stayed inside the building continuously for 48 hours and there was no single dull moment, except when I was falling asleep because of the tiredness!

Thanks to the organisers for creating a place for effective learning and thanks to all the people I met for the wonderful interactions. No need to say I will try to be there also next year!

Italian Agile Day in Bologna - 20.11.2009

Last Friday I went for my first time to the Italian Agile Day, a day of full-immersion in the world of the Italian Agile community, even free as it's autofinanced through donations. This event has grown significantly over the last years, peaking in 400 people attendance last year.

Hosted in a very modern hotel in the suburbs of the city, the conference was organised in three parallel tracks with strong presentations and an open space.

The day started with Peter Stevens' keynote about how agile, with its continuous value delivery, is, in fact, the only way to attack fixed-price projects.

Afterwards the three tracks continued separately: most of the discussions were about the practices of agile, but with some notable excursion into coaching subjects.

The open space was very interesting too: self-organisation ruled and a lot of good discussions came to life, giving me a very good image of the state of agile in Italy. It was interesting to note how the strongly hierarchical and personal-power-oriented structure of the average italian management is shaping the approach to agility somewhat differently than in other countries: software engineering practices are very strong, while Scrum and all the organisational development aspects of agile are a strongly felt wish, but rarely practiced.

Overall a very good day spent meeting a lot of interesting people and making some new friends in this part of the world. Yes: another trip to plan for the next year!