It has already been one week now after Agile Open Belgium 2009 has finished. It was fun organizing and nice to see that again the Open Space Technology works brilliantly. It will definitely be repeated! Again is has provided with a lot of insights and inspired me with good ideas. Have a look at Harald pictures so see for yourself. But what will I remember?
1. Passion
Freddy Van Hoecke, the cook of the excellent food trusted me with the following words: "what strikes me when I listen to all these talks in the lobby, is the passion people bring with it". And he is right-on: organizing and providing logistics is not what makes this a success. It is the passion people have for Agile.
2. Open Beer principles TM
Our local variation on the Open Space principles during dinner at the Vooruit, trying out Agile beers. I'm glad people liked it and experimented with the different flavours. Sounds like test driven beer drinking? I'm just wondering if next year we need to go for chocolates ?
- Who ever drinks are the right people
- What ever beer comes is the right beer
- Whenever it's empty, it's time to order another one
- Whenever it's on the table , it's time to drink
- Law of the two beer: blond beers and brown beers
Machiel Groeneveld proposed a session on Kanban. Unfortunately is was not there, but I heard it went in all directions. And for some reasons people who have attended it, suddenly started using the term gangbang. I find this a fantastic new term to give it a more sexy touch ;-) After all Agile is about connecting people ...
4. Syndromes, Laws and Principles
It's the first time I noticed people mumbling that much on them. This was kind of funny to hear, it reminded me of management old school?!
- Student Syndrome : people will start to fully apply themselves to a task just at the last possible moment before a deadline.
- Parkinson Law : Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
5. Beyond Agile
Even during the session proposals, a few times people mentioned the term Beyond Agile, Agile beyond software development. To me this proves that the interest is rising in applying the same ideas, principles beyond the traditional field of the developer. This is one of the things I try to do by bringing these ideas to sysadmins and people doing support. It was nice to see that the interest is rising and people are willing to break their only silo and open the ideas up to other groups.
See you on the next conference and thanks for being there!