Agile 2011 was by far my best experience yet with the Agile Alliance conference. Two well coordinated keynotes served as bookends setting the tone that agility is about people and how they interact. First Barbara Fredrickson shared her work on the theory of Positive Emotions and the effect creating a positive mindset has on discovering new traits and skills. Then as the final event of the conference, the irrepressible Linda Rising closed out the conference sharing her view that an Agile Mindset makes us resilient to challenge, helping us stay focused on the path to mastery.
In between, the week was jam packed with great sessions and fruitful conversations with colleagues new and old. A few stand out sessions for me were David Hussman's Collaborative Chartering presentation which provided a simple yet powerful tool to ensure teams are ready to start work; Kenny Rubin's strategic filters for portfolio management focusing on agile principles to maximize life cycle profits over entire life of a product; and Stephen Denning's view of Making the Entire Organization Agile that called for 5 shifts in mindset to delight the customer.
Throughout the week co-producer Hans Samios and I, along with some of our review team, kept an eye on the Business and Project Management stage. We had chosen to take the stage in a little different direction from project management to share areas in which agility is being used outside of software development. Our speakers shared many great ideas and viewpoints and were awarded high marks for their efforts. I hope the stage is offered again next year, with a little more appropriate name. My thanks to Hans, our review team, and most of all our speakers for all their hard work in making this happen.
Special to me this year was the first ever Agile Executive Forum presented by the Agile Alliance in collaboration with the Agile Leadership Network. The invitation only event provided 60+ executives and senior managers the opportunity to share their stories and learning as they strive toward spreading agility throughout their enterprises. We heard from executives of Hewlett-Packard, Sabre Airlines Solutions, The Gap, Yahoo!, Precor, Salesforce.com, The Dachis Group, and Menlo Innovations as they described their challenges and successes. The feedback was plentiful, marking the event a rousing success with calls for another gathering next year. I am grateful to co-Chairs Pat Reed and Jim Highsmith, in addition to Linda Cook and the entire program committee for their hard, trail blazing work. The event was a major step forward for the Agile Leadership Network. In addition, I am also want to note this success in light of the first-time collaboration between the Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network, and am hopeful that this is the first of many fruitful efforts between our two organizations.
As the Agile Conference always does, the week in Salt Lake City also provided a forum for other groups and organizations to share some time together. The Agile Leadership Network took advantage of this by holding a luncheon to bring together our board , a few volunteers, members, and chapter leaders to honor the contributions of two of our outgoing board members Jim Highsmith and Todd Little. Wednesday morning's breakfast also saw an impromptu meet and great with a few of our new volunteers, starting to bring them into the Agile Leadership Network community. Finally we took the opportunity to place a marketing piece in all 1600 conference bags showing off our new name and branding, which has already shown an uptick in new membership.
One of the great things about the Agile Conference is the intimate setting the conference organizers go to great lengths to create, fostering open conversations. I was thankful to have the opportunity to talk with friends and colleagues too numerous to mention, as well as meeting many new people who will hopefully become colleagues. All in all, it was a great week in Salt Lake City and I'm already looking forward to Agile 2012 in Dallas.
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