Aug-24/28-09: Agile 2009 Conference, Chicago
The Agile Alliance’s annual conference is in Chicago this year, bringing together Agilists from all over the world. It’s theme is “Making Agile Real.”
What: Agile 2009: Making Agile Real
When: August 24-28, 2009
Where: the Hyatt Regency Chicago
The entire Enthiosys team is joining in the fun, including three sessions with Luke Hohmann centered around Innovation Games, and a talk by Rich Mironov about agile product managers/product owners, who chaired the conference’s APM/PO track.
Agile 2009 is an exciting international conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and first-hand experience, from both the management and technical sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.
Agile 2009 gives attendees access to the latest thinking in this domain, and bridges communities that rarely get a chance to exchange ideas and thoughts. It brings together researchers from labs and academia with executives, managers, and developers in the trenches of software development. The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies.
Download the PDF of Rich Mironov’s talk or see the SlideShare version .
June 11th, 2009 at 11 Jun 2009
A hundred years ago we saw the introduction of a new process for organizing and performing work (now we’re looking for another one). That process employed the most powerful technology at the time – industrial technology – to deliver a significant increase in productivity that made possible the rise of the middle class in what we now call the developed world. That new way of working was called the assembly line. Manufacturing companies in the United States (led by Henry Ford) pioneered the introduction of the assembly line in their factories. Soon companies everywhere were using that new workflow process.
So a hundred years later here we go again. Assembly lines and manufacturing no longer sustain a middle class standard of living in the developed nations because other countries can do those things just as well at much lower costs. We need to find a new way of organizing and performing work that employs the most powerful technology of this time – information technology – to create new value and deliver new productivity.
In this search here’s a key point to keep in mind: The assembly line was to the last century as the agile and responsive enterprise will be to this century. An agile enterprise creates value because it evolves continuously as its customers and markets continuously evolve. Unlike the industrial enterprise, its operating procedures are fluid and flexible, not rigid and linear (like an assembly line). It is powered by technology but not controlled or dominated by technology. (There is a formula to measure business agility – see http://advice.cio.com/a-formula-to-measure-business-agility )
FOOTNOTE: My newest book is called Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World. It talks about all of this; reviewers say it’s a good read with a timely message. You can preview it on Google Books and you can get it on Amazon.