VIRTUAL | Alistair Cockburn: Heart of Agile – GOTO Academy NL

VIRTUAL | Alistair Cockburn: Heart of Agile

An exciting, informative day for all roles and levels to dive into the Heart of Agile from one of the creators of the agile movement.

  • One opening lecture to catch you up on the state of the agile world right now.
  • Two fast-moving activities that involve you cooperating, developing, drawing, and sharing, in short, being agile.
  • Finally, a facilitated small group discussion to work out what to do with all the insights from the day. Set your organization's expectations for agile adoption, create a shared experience for everyone to refer back to, ask difficult questions to one of the founders of the agile movement.

Level
This workshop is for all roles, at all levels in the business, and all levels of agile experience.

Target group
This is a great workout day for an entire organization, from execs to receptionists, business to technical people, novices to experts (yes, even the experts will learn something new!). Use it to level-set vocabulary and expectations for agile, and to create a shared experience to refer back to and create new small improvement initiatives within the organization. General comment heard during this workshop is, "I wish my boss were here!"

Content of the day

  • Lecture: What is and what isn't agile development, and the current state of the art.
  • Timed Activity: A set of cooperative games of invention and communication.
  • Timed Activity: Early business value, trimming the tail.
  • Roundtable Discussion: Questions, answers and discussions from the day.

Course description
This day is designed as a 4-part workshop making sure every job position from execs to testers, understands what is and what isn't agile, and what the most trending themes are today. The value of this one-day workshop is to unify vocabulary, to make sure that everyone hears the same story. Having the executives present alleviates the often-heard complaint, "I wish my boss were here!"

Lecture: The opening lectures introduces key concepts and ideas needed to make use of modern agile development:

  • Decisions flowing through an organization
  • Cooperative games of inventions and communication — "guest leadership"
  • Disciplined learning
  • Craft
  • Trimming the tail on product development

Communication exercise: In this 90-minute activity, the room will be broken into teams of 5-7 people, each with specifiers and artists. The specifiers will be given a drawing to have the artist produce, but they can only use simple text messages to communicate. The teams will go through this activity three times to learn how to reflect and improve during a project, and how to spot impediments to communication and collaboration. This is a high-energy, highly enlightening activity.

Carpaccio (programming) exercise: In this 120 minute activity, people work in pairs on a spreadsheet. The purpose of the exercise is to show how to slice business requests thinly enough to fit into any size of iteration or sprint. This is an intense exercise that shows both business-side and development-side people, how to work in the fine-grained style needed for modern agile development.

Facilitation discussion: In this final activity, discussion groups are formed to discuss what parts of the agile concepts learned during the day will be easy to adopt, and which will be difficult. This section of the day serves so that every person can discuss how to take the day's learning home.

About the trainer
Dr. Alistair Cockburn was voted one of the “The All-Time Top 150 I-Technology Heroes” in 2007 for his pioneering work in agile development and use cases. He co-created the Agile Manifesto, the Declaration of Inter-Dependence, the Agile Leadership Network, and the International Consortium for Agile. He is an expert on agile development, use cases, process design, project management, and software architecture. His current focus is broadcasting the Heart of Agile. He is noted for entertaining and informative lectures and courses. Many of his articles, talks, poems, and blog are online at alistair.cockburn.us. Follow Dr. Alistair Cockburn on twitter

Duration: Four 90-minute modules, in one day
Technical setup: Zoom — more info will be provided after sign-up
Price: €300 excl. VAT

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