Sunday, as I got on a flight and headed to Washington, DC for Agile Alliance’s Agile 2015 conference, I was looking forward to spending a week with other like-minded people who believe in living the agile values and principles and who are investing in themselves and in others to grow in their craft. I anticipate this conference all year because I love the full saturation of agile. I love the networking and new ideas. I love the opportunity to see what others in the industry are up to and to learn from them. And I love meeting new people who teach me great things!
Allison Pollard and I were given the opportunity to present a coaching topic called “Change Your Questions ~ Change Your World” this year. It was exciting to see Allison again and partner with her on this great topic and it was an honor to invest in the agile community at large.
Mornings were filled with “Lean Coffee” which is a facilitation game for having discussions about a range of topics with a group of people who self organize for the purpose of learning and communicating. So many coaches, scrum masters, product owners, managers, software engineers, and quality engineers had such great input and valuable perspectives to share. I had a ton of take-away items from the “Lean Coffee” sessions including ideas about new books to read, ways to manage workflow, how to inspire others, how to develop curiosity, and about interviewing techniques.
One particularly interesting thing I am bringing back from the conference is the use of improv with agile teams. I learned multiple improv activities that help agile teams learn valuable lessons and it completely blew my mind! I’m also bringing back a card game called, “The Product Owner Game” that helps product owners learn to balance cost and business value in order to select the most valuable features and user stories to work on each sprint. I attended a session on user story mapping that provided a great exercise I’m going to be able to walk through with product owners and scrum masters to help them learn this technique and bring it back to their teams for quarterly planning improvement.
There were multiple sessions about coaching in the midst of culture transformation and organizational change. One particularly interesting session provided me with a new tool called an empathy map that I can’t wait to use! Sessions about conflict and toxic environments provided exercises to help people discover their own triggers in order to learn how to deal with them in a healthy manner. I learned how to create an influence map that helps you look at an organization in a way that provides insight to areas where coaching can have the largest impact. I learned a new coaching model and attended a session on executive coaching that was fascinating. I learned from master coaches how to sharpen my professional coaching skills specifically for use in an agile environment and I learned more about how to take a coaching approach to mentoring.
In all this was one of the most successful learning weeks I’ve had all year. The return on investment for this conference was incredible just in the things I’m bringing back to the organization to help others grow. There are many ways companies can invest in its people to help them grow in understanding of agile. In my opinion, Agile Alliance’s Agile 201X conferences gives one of the highest rates of return of any conference I attend.
Tandem Coaching Academy 