I've been sitting here for the past few hours... in my favorite coffee shop... thinking through this past week... contemplating my upcoming week... and trying to decide how to get back into the groove of writing. My intent coming here was to share some thoughts on the conference. Right now, I just don't have the energy. The week was full of late nights... early mornings... lots of meetings... lots of sessions... talking to customers... debating ideas... reconnecting with old friends... and making a few new ones.
It was awesome meeting some of you guys that follow me here and on Twitter. It's always a hoot when a tiny little 64x64 picture... one that speaks in 140 character bursts... turns into a real... living... breathing... human being you can go drinking with ;-)
Part of my challenge writing about the conference is that I'm still not really clear on how I feel about it. There were so many great sessions... so many excellent topics... so many excellent speakers... but how many of their ideas can actually be implemented when people go back to their real worlds? It is great to get pumped up at a conference... but how long will that enthusiasm last when we take these ideas back and meet crushing resistance?
If I were king for a day... I'd like to see an entire stage next year dedicated to organizational agility and scaling. We need to start talking about how these ideas get applied in real companies... with real management hierarchies... with real PMO's... with real planning cycles. I want to talk about agile ideas in the context in which the ideas were successful and explore how we can do them at scale. Alistair pointed out during his keynote that agile was designed for small teams working with discretionary funds... but that is seldom where we find it applied.
I'd like to see experience reports from people that are really doing this. I'd like to hear from CEOs and CIOs who have been able to lead sustainable change. I'd like the talks to be vetted in advance by a real person and accompanied by a proceedings paper. I'd like to have breakout sessions and workshops that allow us to explore these Big Agile problems together. It just seems that we don't really have this worked out yet.
Aside from that... some of my bright spots happened outside the session rooms. I personally want to thank Kent McDonald for his 3 minute overview of Feature Injection and Karl Scotland for the great discussion on Kanban and Drum-Buffer-Rope over way too many drinks. I really enjoyed Alistair's opening keynote and Jared's closing keynote. Both were very entertaining.
Thanks to Dennis Stevens for the 20/20 presentation on Capability Analysis. Thanks to DZone for the interview and all those that attended my session on the Agile PMP. Thanks to all the folks that came by the VersionOne booth... it was great talking to you. Thanks to the Agile PMI crew, especially Michele Sliger for putting up with me Sunday night. Last but not least... thanks to Eric Guitar Davis and the Troublemakers... you guys totally kick ass!
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