I was fortunate to co-produce a stage for the Agile conference again this year. While the producers typically get the credit, it is the review teams that do the bulk of the work. So first off, let me thank co-producer Hans Samios and reviewers Betsy Applegate, Karen Base, Alan Bustamante, Brian Maguire, Simon Orrell, Mike Russell, and Angeline Tan for the time and energy they each volunteered over the last 10 weeks or so. Coming together quickly as a good self-organizing agile team, they collectively are responsible for the program you will see for the Business and Project Management stage at Agile 2011. Personally I am very pleased with the result they have produced and am confident that the stage will be well received at the conference. 
The stage itself has a pretty tight focus on what’s next for agility and examines how agile principles and practices can be applied outside of the domain of software development projects. This, I believe, is an appropriate discussion for the 10 -year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto when many in our community have starting to have that exact discussion.
As always the competition to be selected to present at the conference is very stiff. Our team reviewed 78 submissions for around 15 slots in the overall program. The team completed almost 200 reviews, many of which helped submitters find more appropriate stages where their submissions would have a better chance of being recommended for the final program. We had several considerations in making our final recommendations:
- How well did the session match the stage goals? Many submitters even specifically pointed out the questions in the stage description they hoped to address.
- Did the submission have good clearly stated learning objectives and a plan for achieving them?
- Did the submitter openly engage with the review team, responding to review comments and questions? For many of our recommended sessions, the submitters did a great job of responding to our comments and questions helping us more clearly understand their intent. Some also followed-up on our suggestions to shape their sessions to better reflect the stage goals.
- Did the submitter plan for some level of interaction with their audience through group exercises or other activities?
New to the submission process this year was an Early Bird Submission period, and it turned out to be a resounding success. For our t
eam, the early bird submissions were of a consistently higher quality and our interaction with the early bird submitters was considerably better. As a result far more of our final recommendations came from the early bird submissions. It is also interesting to note that our team completed an average of 3.4 reviews for the early bird submissions and only 2.7 reviews for the later submissions. In hindsight and a lesson learned for next year, we should have accepted some percentage of our sessions soon after the Early Bird revision deadline and not waited for all the later submissions to come in.
Over the last decade, the annual Agile conference presented by the Agile Alliance has become the culminating must-attend event of the year for our community. This is in no small part due to agile spirit so ably exhibited in the planning and execution of the conference. While the submission process can always be improved, it is by far the most open and transparent process of any conference of which I am aware. It was a privilege to be able to participate in that again for Agile 2011.
| Comments |
|