This year I was privileged to serve as the stage producer for the Agile Adoption stage for the Agile2010 conference. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Leadership and Organizations program chair Pollyanna Pixton for this opportunity. In addition, my thanks extend to David Chilcott who agreed to serve as Assistant Stage Producer, as well as Angeline Tan, Simon Orrell, Mike Russell, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Derek Wade and Ron Lichty who all stepped up to serve admirably well as reviewers. Their hard work and dedication resulted in what I am very confident will be a great agile adoption program. What follows are some brief highlights of our experience together.
The Challenge
Our greatest challenge was the simple math. More than 800 proposals were submitted to the conference. Officially 350 of those made it to the Leadership and Organizations theme, although with the churn around aligning the submissions to themes, the L&O stage producers looked at more like 450. The Agile Adoption stage ended up with 83 submissions, but again with the effort to align submissions to stages, we looked at more like 100. The end result was 11 sessions chosen for the program, plus 3 more recommended to be presented as invited tutorial sessions on the opening day of the conference. The simple math: 13% of the submissions accepted. That was hard and frustrating for the team, but more importantly very disappointing for the remaining 87% who received as diplomatic of an email as we could craft, informing them that their submission was appreciated, but not accepted.
The Mechanics
The first thing was to define the tone of the stage. Agile Adoption is a broad topic and when considering it, there would be the potential for significant overlap with the other L&O stages: Leadership and Culture, Agile Organizations and Enterprises, Coaching Agile, and Building High Performance Teams. After all, you cannot talk about adoption and avoid talking about leadership, culture, organizations, coaching, and high performance teams. So we decided to focus on the transitioning aspects of how teams, leaders, and organizations can achieve and sustain the appropriate balance between process and culture as described by the four tenets of the Agile Manifesto.
Second, was to set the tone of the adoption stage team. User stories offered a good way to do that and so we focused on achieving these six stories:
- As a session submitter, I want to get feedback on my session proposal so that I can refine and improve my session to better align with the goals of the agile adoption stage.
- As a session submitter, I want to my session proposal to be reviewed in an open and transparent way so that I understand the selection process.
- As a session submitter, I want to receive comments from reviewers so that I may understand how my submission compares to the others proposed for the agile adoption stage.
- As a stage producer, I want reviewers to open a dialog with submitters so that we can craft the most effective program for the agile adoption stage.
- As a stage producer, I want session recommendation decisions made at the last responsible moment so that we select the most outstanding sessions and presenters for the agile adoption stage.
Third, was finding a way for the team do its work together. We were a distributed team that never met face-to-face. We were dispersed from Houston, to the west coast, to the east coast, to Canada with some members frequently traveling. A Google Group help us communicate and store what documentation we needed. This coupled with weekly “daily stand-up” flavored conference calls, allowed the team stay focused, express concerns, highlight sessions of interest, and debate the meaning of some of the discussions started by our reviews.
The Program
We found many very good submissions to include in the program; enough to easily fill not only our stage, but most of the others in our theme as well. At an appropriate point, the team agreed that we each share a list of our top 3 proposals plus 3 alternates. The quality and quantity of the proposals quickly stretched the “plus alternates”. Personally I could not resist submitting a list of my top 3 with 7 alternates. This narrowed our focus to around 30 proposals rather than 80 or 90. With some churn still occurring to align proposals to stages, a few late comers came our way too. These were certainly at a disadvantage, but they were considered and I believe a couple made it into the top 3 lists. It was easier to answer, “Do I like this one better than any of the others on my top 3 list?”
Then the hard part began. How to select the final program? Derek Wade suggested the “Buy a Feature” Innovation Game. While I liked this idea, I was concerned about the time it might take to both setup the game and then orient the team to it. With an earlier start though, I think it is an intriguing idea to pursue next time around. Eventually we decided to go with a version of dot voting. We each had 100 points to spread around the combined top 3 lists as we saw fit. Ranking them by total votes, gave us a basis to speak to our recommendations and over a 3-day period debate their relative merits, change our minds, recast our votes, and debate some more. The end result is the Agile Adoption program that will be presented at the Agile2010 Conference in August.
I feel very good about the result the team accomplished and very appreciative of the hard work and dedication they each volunteered to accomplish it. This is more poignant with the realization that some of the team will not be able to participate in the conference itself; either their own submission was not accepted, or employment commitments or financial constraints won’t allow it.
What Was Important?
Relative rankings don't get you a point of selecting the best 13% of anything. The discussion is what mattered and there were some common threads that made the difference in recommending a session or not.
- Did the submitter respond to our comments and engage in a dialog with us? We took that as a good sign that they would do the same with their audience and having interactive sessions was important to us.
- Was the submission unique? With so few program sessions to fill, we could not accept multiple proposals that spoke to the same subject matter. This of course made the math even worse. Being in the top 13% was not enough, you had to have the number 1 proposal on the topic. Dave Nicolette's proposal "Whiter Agile?" is a good case in point. Before our team even looked at it, there were already several reviews and even more comments. It suffered a bit in that it was not easily aligned to a stage and therefore banged around awhile. When we got it, we decided it was an important topic just by the sheer volume of discussion it had already generated in the submission system. No other proposal came close to the subject or the amount of activity, so we recommended it as one our invited sessions.
- Did the proposal speak to the transition aspects of adoption we set as a goal? Oddly enough, far too many proposals did not align well to any particular stage. That's a topic the conference committee should address next year.
The Hopes
With some time to reflect on the last few months that we all invested in this, I’d offer the following hopes:
- I hope our reviewers all find their way to conference to witness the results of their efforts.
- I hope all the presenters we selected for the conference live up to our faith in them; a large number of others would have happily taken their place.
- I hope that those presenters who were not selected understand and will not be discouraged from submitting again next year.
Finally, I hope that more people have the opportunity to contribute to agile conferences in this way. It gives us a opportunity to walk the walk, expand horizons, grow teams, and focus on the central issues of the day. All of which help build a stronger agile community.
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