I hope you enjoy it. “This person has more stories and may be funnier in person than the slides appear to be.”

As I’ve been working with clients, I’ve been updating my thinking—what a surprise (not really :-)) And, I’ve been fixing/updating my pictures. This presentation has my most current images.

Oct 24-Oct 28, I was in Vancouver, BC at Much Ado About Agile 2011. I delivered a keynote entitled, “Where is Agile Going?” The theme of the conference was “The Elephant in the Room.”

The following week, Oct 30-Nov 4, I was a host and session leader at the AYE Conference, Cary, NC. No slides. If you participated in the conference, keep an eye on our wiki for our pdfs.

Then, I flew across the Atlantic and traveled to  Oredev, in Malmo, Sweden for the conference Nov 7-11. I gave a talk about Managing for Collaboration from the management perspective (as opposed to the program management perspective). I also gave an updated version of my Agile Portfolio Planning: Managing Your Project Portfolio.

Then I took the train back to Copenhagen and flew to Berlin (and took a taxi to Potsdam) for Agile Testing Days, Nov 14-17. My keynote was Agile Testing and Test Management. Of course, I have ideas about how to make it better, so I hope to repeat it sometime.

Some highlights from my trip:

• Everyone (and everything) I met appeared quite orderly. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. I saw this at the lost-luggage counter, in the hotel, and at the conference.
• I was pleasantly surprised that the subway ticket machines had an “English” button so I could buy my ticket and know what I was doing. The maps were in English as well as Japanese, so I could know in advance what my trip would be and which stop to get off at. I had a little trouble with which track, but that’s probably because I was jet-lagged.
• I was pleasantly surprised to see evidence that the simultaneous interpretation for my keynote worked fairly well. I could tell because people laughed when they were supposed to :-)
• For the tutorial, I did not allow enough time for the consecutive interpretation or for the questions about agile, so I needed another 20 minutes, which I did not have :-(
• I was a little concerned that when the panel prepared for the questions, I thought we might be boring. Nope, we were thought-provoking and funny.
• My Japanese hosts were amazingly solicitous and helpful for my entire experience: to/from the airport, to/from the conference, to/from sessions at the conference

I had a blast. I hope I have an opportunity to return to Japan. Now, all I have to do is get enough sleep so I’m awake during the day…

The best thing, aside from being able to publish our program, is that we discovered that when we are together, the creative juices fly. For example, instead of two people pairing to teach the warm-up tutorial, we decided we all teach the tutorial. Not all of us all the time. No, we’ll still pair-teach, but we’ll pair with different people over the course of the day. That way we all get to know the new participants. Since AYE is so participatory, we expect this will help us learn the new peoples’ names. And, it might help these people make decisions about which sessions to choose when.

I’ve updated all my sessions. This year, I’m offering

• You Are Here. You Want to Go There?
• The Budgeting Black Hole: Predicting the Unknowable
• Coaching is a Two-Way Relationship
• Agile Program Management: Another Approach to Large Projects
• A Fresh Catch, so I can have a little while to see what strikes my fancy as the conference gets closer. Or, if you decide to participate, you can request a session from me.
• Coping With Change in Your Life

The Coping with Change session is a brand new session that does not arise from my work, per se. My fellow hosts suggested I use some of the ideas from my previous Reinventing Yourself sessions and what I’ve done in the past four-plus months to manage my life and offer a session. Let me know if you think this is a good idea :-)

We discovered that when we meet in person, we are much more creative than we are on the phone in our biweekly phone calls. We might have developed some of the new ideas, such as the Fresh Catch idea on the phone. Maybe. But I don’t think so.

We have an innovative program this year, aside from it being experiential and interactive. Our tagline this year is “Exploring Human Systems in Action.” We will be designing the post conference tutorial to help people take advantage of what they learned during the conference and explore more, and we don’t quite know what that looks like yet, so it’s still a Fresh Catch.

As hosts, we’ve known each other for more than a decade. We’ve worked together on the conference for the last 10 years. We work on our relationships. We talk biweekly all year and meet once. But this year we realized that we were much more creative in person than we ever are on the phone. The ideas flowed–we had no problem generating ideas.

On our calls, we often have trouble generating ideas. I don’t know why. But we innovate in person. That’s why we’re going to work on getting together again later this year.

In the meantime, you can review the whole AYE program and register. Yes, registration is up and working, I believe. If not, let me know. That’s my job to resolve.

I work hard on my speaking skills–not just how I present myself on the platform, but also the content of what I say, and how I present that. I’ve almost converted to Keynote, but occasionally still use PowerPoint.

For AYE, we don’t use any PowerPoint (or equivalent) at all. Here’s why. If you scroll down, you’ll see Dwayne’s reference to Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan, an engineer turned comic. (I laughed out loud.)

At Better Software, I’m doing an hour-long thing (not quite a full workshop, but much more interactive than an hour talk) about how to be a better speaker. I was going to mention all the points Don makes, but I might just play the video.

Some of the additional points I was going to make are:

• Don’t drone on about you or your company. Set the context in less than 30 seconds.
• Make eye contact with the people in your audience.
• Use a microphone.
• Understand that the people in the audience want you to succeed. You don’t have to think about them as naked (icky, yucky, blech), just as people.
• Market your session all through the conference.

Do you have any pet peeves about speakers? Anything else I should make sure to include?

Labels: conference, humor, speaking

From time to time, I refer to AYE. It’s a conference several other consultants and I created back in 2000. We were tired of feeling forced into short sessions where it was too hard to convey how our topics felt to people. (There’s just so much you can do with PowerPoint.)

At AYE, all the sessions are experiential or at the least, interactive. I experiment with new simulations and experiences there. Because we limit the conference attendance to 99 people, even if I screw up a simulation, there aren’t so many people in a session that I can’t somehow make it right.

I’m leading 5 sessions this year:

• The Savvy Project Manager:Dealing with Multitasking (changed simulation from last year)
• Writing Workshop with Naomi Karten
• Management Behind Closed Doors with Esther
• Transforming Rules into Guides with Jerry
• Reinventing Yourself

The early-bird discount deadline is April 30. For $1200 (only through April 30) you can participate in everything the conference has to offer. I hope you join us. For more information, take a look at the wiki and the registration page. Even if you choose to not join us yet, I hope you join our low-volume, private email list.

Labels: AYE conference

I’m finally back home after 4 weeks on the road. Yes, I was completely nuts to spend 4 weeks away. My office is a disaster, and so is my email. (My domain name is being spoofed, so I’m getting thousands of returned failed email messages a day. Pain in the tush to process.) So, here’s my trip report from AYE 2006.

Normally, I lead 5 sessions out of 6 session slots. This year, because Jerry was recuperating and unable to be there, I led 6 sessions. I’m thinking of limiting myself to just 4 sessions in the future. We’ll see :-)

Monday morning, I led a session about Multitasking. The multitasking simulation went well, although I’m planning to get different puzzles to make the work different for each group. I then added too much stuff to the session, to deal with multi-tasking. I’m going to have to focus the next piece better next year. This simulation is different from the one in my PM workshop. I think this one is better.

Monday afternoon, Esther and I led a Behind Closed Doors session. I was pleased with this one. We even got a nice writeup on cio.com. Esther and I have been refining the simulations and activities for a couple of years now and our practice shows.

Tuesday morning, I facilitated Reinventing Yourself. This session is about recognizing the patterns we have in our (work) lives, and choosing whether to continue those patterns. Last year, I had about 40 people in the session. This year I had about 10. Because of smaller group, I was able to abandon my session design partway through the session and kept moving with the energy in the room. (One of the reasons I keep my workshops small is so I can see where the energy is and move with it.) I’m still hearing nice things about this session, so I’m happy with it.

Tuesday afternoon, Naomi Karten and I led a Presentation session. Naomi’s been a professional speaker for many years, and suggested I also join National Speaker’s Association. I’ve been a member for about 10 years, and have found it valuable. Several of the participants started the session concerned and ill-at-ease speaking in front of groups. By the end, they seem to have learned some ideas and tips to help.

Wednesday morning, Naomi and I led a writing workshop. I love facilitating this session. You can see some of the results here. I’m planning to post my rough draft about multi-tasking there, and refine it here, and then further refine it for the PM book.

Wednesday afternoon, I led Transforming Rules into Guides originally one of Jerry’s sessions. We all have survival rules. Looking both ways before you cross the street is a very handy survival rule. But some of our rules, especially about our conduct with other people or what we can say to other people can be quite limiting. We may need to choose whether we keep these rules as is or transform them into guides, so we can choose whether to follow them. We were able to transform two rules in the session–quite an accomplishment. (I was the facilitator; the people in the session do all the work.)

I’m finally back, working on the PM book and catching up on my email. Hope you had a delightful 4 weeks :-)

I’m leading several sessions at SD Best Practices, Sept 11-14, 2006. Here’s the list:

• Monday, Sept 11: Coaching Your Peers and Staff to Excellence (half-day experiential)
• Wednesday, Sept 13: Predicting Project Completion
• Wednesday, Sept 13: Develop Your Interviewing Skills
• Thursday, Sept 15: Managing the Project Portfolio
• Thursday, Sept 14: Successful Software Management: 15 Lessons Learned

I’ll also be signing books, but I don’t know when that is yet.

I hope you decide to come to all or part of the conference. If you register as a VIP (all week pass) before September 6, 2006, you can save $400 off the regular price. The priority code is 6ESPK81.

BTW, I don’t think that what I do is “best” practices, but practices that make sense in a bunch of situations. I try to include enough detail in my talks so that the participants can make the approaches best for their context and themselves.

I’ve just returned from the last of my spring conferences. And, I’m struck again by how much training is available to people at conferences and how cheap it is. You may be shaking your head, saying, NO JR, Conferences are expensive, about $5000 per person for the week, once you factor in travel along with the conference fee. How can you say they’re cheap??

The value of a conference is partially in the tutorials, partially in the sessions, and partially in the networking you do with other attendees. Here’s a way to qualitatively measure value of a conference, assuming you attend for 5 days, taking 2 tutorials, and 2.5 days of sessions:

Days 1 and 2: Participate in a tutorial from 9-5. Take away three things from each tutorial you can apply next week. Network with and meet 3 other people (in each tutorial) in similar circumstances to you. Days 3, 4, 5: Attend sessions, some in your area of expertise, some not. Attend one session with interactivity of some sort. Meet 3 new people each day. Take away 3 ideas each day. At the end of the week, you have 15 new ideas, and 15 new people in your network. If you just stopped there, you’d have received plenty of value for your money. It will take you months to try each of the 15 ideas and see how to adapt them to your environment. If you also continue to correspond with your 15 new colleagues, using them for support, mentoring, and coaching (which goes both ways), you’ll received peer consulting of tremendous value. I don’t know how to quantitatively measure this, but it seems to me that 15 new ideas and 15 new colleagues can help you make at least some progress on what appear to be your intractable problems. If you can even partially solve one problem, you’ve regained the cost of the conference.

But you can use conferences in other ways too. You can meet experts in your field, learn what you can from them, and continue to contact them throughout the year for quick feedback. At the conferences, the speakers and famous experts meet with people at mealtimes formally and informally, through BOFs or Open Space or other informal discussions. I had an Open Space session last week that only had 3 people (one of which was Esther, so the participants got to hear from two of us how to identify appropriate skills and questions (and write ads) for bringing people into an agile team and into a highly technical test team. One-on-one consulting for 2 hours — included in the price of the conference. That’s unbelievably cheap.

Conferences re-energize people. Conferences with highly participatory sessions, such as the AYE conference help you learn by practicing while you confer. But as long as there is space in the conference to discuss issues with new-found colleagues and speakers, you have the opportunity to learn at a conference.

Don’t dismiss conferences as a waste of time or a boondogle. Speakers (whether they are consultants or not) use conferences to articulate techniques to solving problems. They may even be able to help you adapt their solution to your problem.

So try a conference this year. Local one-day conferences are extremely cheap (a few hundred dollars at most). If you do attend one, make sure you know how to contact the speakers, so you can follow up with questions later. If you want more than one day, but you’re not sure about an entire week, try a shorter conference, or go for just part of the week. Wherever possible, choose interactive and experiential sessions because you’ll learn more by discussing the problem with your peers and practicing solutions than just by thinking about or listening to how someone else solved the problem.