David West has been a software professional for forty years, most recently as a consultant/coach in Agile, Design, and Enterprise-IT Integration. He is the author of Object Thinking (Microsoft Press Professional) and has been a speaker at numerous conferences including SPLASH (new OOPSLA), Onward!, Agile, and various PLoPs. He has graduate degrees in Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, and Cognitive Science along with an undergraduate education in Asian Philosophy.

He believes in people, not technology or methodology. He has a wealth of experience in achieving systemic change and IT-Enterprise integration while significantly, reducing IT costs.

We are very privileged to present David’s workshop on ‘The Agile Enterprise‘ at Agile India 2013. His many years of experience will no doubt add immense value to the conference.

We asked David some questions about his workshop. A key focus of the workshop will be about breaking down the silos that exist between IT and business.

Why is it important to break down silos that often exist between IT and business?

There are two important reasons. The first arises from the four agile values (originally XP values) – two of which, Communication and Feedback – mandate the free flow of information “in real time.” By real time, I mean the time frame in which the work is being done. There is nothing more frustrating than having to wait for a question and answer to go through channels, when a direct communication could resolve the issue and allow you to proceed with your work. If you look at all the agile practices, most of them are intended to enhance communications among the Whole Team.

The second reason is not as easy to see. We have known since the 1960s of the problem of “necessary interpretation.” An example: The business person articulates some needs and expectations – requirements – to the systems analyst. This is done using some kind of ‘formal’ model. The model cannot contain all of the understanding of the business person, tacit knowledge is omitted, for example. The system analyst must interpret the model, using her own mental language and translate the requirements into specifications, again omitting much of what she knows from her formal model. The programmer must, yet again interpret the specifications and translate into their mental language (which is a function of the particular programming language used) and write their code. This chain of interpretation and translation consistently generates software that bears only a partial resemblance to what was expected. The more links in the chain – the more silos you pass through – the greater the divergence.

In your experience, what makes it really hard to break down these silos?

Business, and to an even greater degree Software Engineering, are grounded in a philosophy of “scientific management.” This is a cultural phenomenon which means we are not even aware, usually, of why we do things the way we do. Scientific management principles focus on formality, constraint, and control. In communications this takes the form of establishing formal communication channels, defined formats for communication (formal models like UML), and limits on how many people any individual should manage and therefore communicate with. Add a strict hierarchy, and you get lots of silos. This is justified with arguments like, “you cannot have everyone talk to the CEO, she would not have the time to read and respond.” This entire culture of scientific management extends beyond the IT shop and the business and makes it extremely hard to change – even with awareness.

What will be the key take away for the workshop attendees?

Participants will leave with a simple and extremely powerful model of the enterprise; useful for integrating IT efforts with business objectives, mapping agile practices to the satisfaction of business needs – all while providing a foundation for leveraging IT to support an agile and innovative organization.

If you’re thinking of registering for this workshop, do remember that seats are limited. Book soon to avoid disappointment. http://booking.agilefaqs.com

At Agile India 2013, in addition to the main conference, we will be hosting fourteen exclusive workshops, all by well known, expert agilists. This is an unique opportunity to learn from experts around the world.

Recently we interviewed Laurent Bossavit to get some insight into his rather different workshop – ‘Playing games for fun and profit‘.

Picture by Bam Thomas

Laurent Bossavit started of his career as a developer and was an “early adopter” of Agile. He was the recipient of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for contributions to Agile practice. Laurent is one of the people who has invested a lot in bringing agile to a wider know audience. He also wrote the book ‘The Leprechauns of Software Engineering‘.

He now heads Institut Agile, a privately funded, independent entity whose missions include growing the Agile business ecosystem, creating stronger links between the business and research communities interested in Agile approaches, and providing stronger empirical evidence on the benefits and limitations of Agile practices.

During the interview, we asked the following questions to Laurent:

What triggered your interest in agile games?

Games, interactive workshops and project simulations have been part of the Agile thinking and teaching toolkit from the very beginning. My first experience was using the ExtremeHour format back in 2000, to teach a team, I had recently joined, the basics of Extreme Programming. I’ve never stopped using them since, in my training classes and in retrospectives for instance.

Some of the core Agile practices, such as “Planning Poker“, also take the form of games. However, more recently a number of Agile folks have started seeing and using Agile games not just as teaching or coaching tools, but also as an integral part of the way teams can work together. For instance, they can be used to bring about better understanding and collaboration between Product Owners and developers on a team.

These more recent developments reinforced my interest and made me look at our use of games in a new light.

What are the advantages/benefits of using agile games as opposed to traditional methods like meetings?

Suppose you’re interested in getting a group’s best ideas on an important decision, such as which features to include or leave out of the next release of a software product or system. It’s often a lot of hard work convening and running a meeting for this kind of result: someone has to put a lot of effort into running the meeting, making sure everybody contributes their knowledge but nobody “takes over” the meeting, and so on. Even when meetings are run efficiently, people rarely like them – and so, sometimes, participants end up sabotaging them.

With a “serious game” approach you don’t need to run things: you explain the rules and the objectives, stand back, and let the process unfold. If the game is well-designed, not only will you reach the intended outcome – a set of decisions – you will also have fully engaged participants who all contribute to the extent that they have creative ideas, and on top of that have fun and want to do it again!

What is the take away for the attendees from the workshop?

This is a completely hands-on experience; we’ll play a number of games, and during the debriefs we’ll discuss why and how they work in business settings. The idea is to come away with games that you can use immediately on getting back to work from the conference.

Attending the workshop is a great way to get a first introduction to Agile games for people who are new to the topic, and maybe to discover some new games for people who are already experienced. There will be something for everyone!

If you’re thinking of registering for this workshop, do remember that seats are limited. Book soon to avoid disappointment. http://booking.agilefaqs.com

At the Agile India 2013 Conference, we are pleased to offer you 14 exclusive workshops.

The following three workshops should give you a feel for what we have in store:

The Fastest Learner Wins by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
===============================================
No matter how large and successful a company is today, it’s long term survival is by no means guaranteed. Only a few large companies have been able to sustain growth over time by coming up with a steady stream of new disruptive businesses. How do they do it? More…http://bit.ly/ThmqKV

Honing Technical Practices To Realize Sustainable Agility by Venkat Subramaniam
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Agile development is the new rage. Everyone is doing it. Organizations of various size and in different market have jumped on the bandwagon. They’re practicing various management approaches and are holding stand-ups. But, the key question is, are they succeeding with it? More…http://bit.ly/Thmri7

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making in Software Development by Linda Rising
==================================================================
For those of us who struggle with complex problems for a living, unfortunately, don’t have time to keep up with the enormous amount of research in cognitive science that would help us be better thinkers and influencers. More…http://bit.ly/ThmkmE

The third workshop we are covering is ‘Problem-Solving and Decision-Making in Software Development‘ by Linda Rising.

Linda is well known for her book ‘Fearless change Patterns for Introducing New Idea‘. It is cited for providing proven techniques, formulated as patterns, for implementing change in teams and organizations. She is well respected for her work on patterns and their application in the workplace.

Linda has delivered keynotes at many agile conferences and is an internationally well-known speaker. We are really looking forward to her keynote at Agile India 2013 and also this particular workshop.

This week we spent some time with Linda to get further information on her workshop and to discuss her keen interest in how the brain works.

What motivated you to do research in cognitive science?

When Mary Lynn and I were writing Fearless Change, one of our reviewers said that the reason the patterns worked was because they were based on influence strategies. I had heard of “influence” but didn’t realize it was a special area of study in “social” psychology – the psychology of group behavior. I started looking at the growing research in that field and it led to my current passion to follow advances in cognitive psychology. This field is making enormous headway and it has significant impact on the way we work. We need to pay attention.

Can you give us an example of the application of cognitive science in software development?

The most important news from this area is the disturbing finding that we are not rational thinkers. I have believed this nearly all my very long life so it is difficult for me to accept, even as I read the pretty clear evidence. Even smart people are not rational. And, it’s not that we are not rational some of the time. The message is that we struggle to apply rational approaches to any of our decisions. This turns our development process upside down. In the past we believed that customers were rational, fellow developers and testers were rational and that was how we communicated and made decisions. Seeing that we make decisions based on what is not only not rational but not available to us or anyone else, means that we can’t make assumptions about what others say or do.

What is the take away for the attendees from the workshop?

It’s impossible to summarize all of the advances in cognitive science but I will try to hand attendees a list of practical tips that they can apply when they return to work. These tips will help them be better thinkers, better problem-solvers, and better able to influence others. I also hope to encourage all of the participants to become interested in this area. I can provide references to help them get started.

Who is the target audience for the workshop?

Anyone who works in any organization and must solve problems, make decisions, or convince others will benefit.

Some past talks by Linda: http://web.lindarising.info/Live_.html

This is the second in the series of posts that we will be doing for workshops taking place at Agile India 2013. The next workshop we are focusing on is “Honing Technical Practices To Realize Sustainable Agility” by Venkat Subramaniam.

Venkat is founder of Agile Developer, Inc. and has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He is also an award-winning author and has written several books including: ‘NET Gotchas’ and ‘Practices of an Agile Developer’ (winner of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award). He is a regular invited speaker at several international conferences.

We feel quite privileged to have him present several talks and also this workshop at Agile India 2013. He was one of the favorite speakers at Agile India 2012 based on the feedback we received. Also his video from Agile Inida 2012, was the most viewed video online.

While Venkat was traveling around the world attending conferences, we stole some of his time and asked him a few questions about his workshop.

What’s the take away for the attendees from the workshop?

Learning practical technical practices to sustain and succeed with agile development.

Agile development is really feedback driving development. Many organization and teams are really excited and focused on succeeding with agile development. They have aggressively adopted various management practices. While this is good and essential, it is not sufficient.

In addition to receiving feedback, the team has to respond quickly and effectively to the feedback received. In addition to right intentions, the team needs to have the technical ability to respond to change. It is hard to be agile if our code sucks. Having high quality code and quickly running automated tests, can help respond to those feedback and keep the response cycle running smooth.

Management practices (and the management support) are like the left wheels of a car. Technical practices (and the support from programmers and testers) are like the right wheels of a car. For a stable sustainable progress these wheels have to be aligned.

Programmers serious about improving their technical skills to support agile development on their projects or for the companies will benefit from this workshop. They will learn specific skills that have impact on their ability to respond to change and support their teams. They will learn how to create lightweight, evolutionary design, how to recognize and evaluate such design, to refactor code, write useful unit tests, create effective mocks, and how to practically create continuous integration feedback loops.

I invite programmers to bring their computers, roll up their sleeves, pair up with fellow practitioners, get their hands dirty with code and design, and hone their technical skills through this workshop. There is very little theory in this workshop, its all about learning by doing.

What are some of the main topics covered in the workshop?

• Agile development and sustainability
• Cost of technical practices
• Driving design using automated tests
• Evolutionary architecture
• How to make good use of mocks to aid unit testing?
• How and when to refactor code?
• Practicals of continuous integration

Are there specific tools or languages that you plan to focus on?

There is strong influence of programming languages and automated tools in this workshop. However, programmers have the flexibility to use the language they’re most comfortable with or relevant to their work. I can comfortably program in about 8 languages, which includes the main stream languages, so should be able to assist the programmers with specific questions and also compare and contrast approaches based on language influences.

Who’s the workshop intended for?

Programmers passionate and genuinely interested in improving their technical skills to support their organization’s agile development efforts.

Links to some talks/presentations by Venkat:

http://blog.agiledeveloper.com/2012/01/collections-of-presentation-videos.html

At this point, 400 delegates have registered for Agile India 2013 Conference in less than 3 weeks.

Looking at the delegates who’ve registered so far, we have represenation from the following companies:

• Aconex
• Alcatel Lucent
• Alliance Global Services
• Allscripts India Pvt. Ltd
• Aricent Technologies
• BNP Paribas India Solutions
• Cognizant Technology Solutions
• Direction Software Solution
• eGain Communications
• Enteleki Technology Solutions
• Envestnet, India
• GembaTech
• HCL
• HCL Technologies
• Huawei Technologies
• Independent Consultant
• InMobi
• InRhythm
• Inteamo
• Intergraph Consulting Pvt. Ltd.
• John Deere India Private Limited
• MSCI
• Multunus Software
• Ostrya Labs
• Pitney Bowes Software
• Rotary International Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
• S.i. Systems
• SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd.
• Shop Smart Inc/BradsDeals.com
• Societe Generale
• Software Artisan
• Support.com
• SymphonyTeleca Corporation
• Synerzip Softech India Pvt. Ltd.
• Tata Consultancy Services
• TenXperts Technologies
• Thomson Reuters
• ThoughtWorks Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.
• Yahoo India Pvt Ltd

And their roles:

• Agile and Lean Coach
• Agile Coach
• Agile Coach/Scrum Master
• Agile Project Manager
• Architect
• CEO
• Co-Founder and CEO
• Code Junkie
• Code Monkey
• Consultant
• Development Manager
• Director
• Director-Quality
• Engineer 2
• Engineering – Director
• Engineering Lead
• Engineering Manager
• EVP & CTO
• Executive Manager
• General Manager
• General Manager – Quality
• Head of Engineering
• Head of Project Management
• Lead Executive Quality
• Manager
• Product Owner
• Product Owner/Technical Lead
• Program Manager
• Project Manager
• Senior Consultant
• Senior Manager
• Senior Manager – Consulting
• Senior Manager-Technical Group head
• Senior Manager, Agile Coach
• Senior Project Manager
• Senior Software Engineer
• Software Architect
• Software Artisan
• Software Developer (Embedded System)
• Sr. Associate
• Sr Engineer
• Sr. Manager
• Sr. Manager – Projects
• Sr. Project Manager
• Sr. Quality Manager
• Sr. Software Engineer1
• Sr. Vice President
• Team Lead
• Technologist
• VP Solutions

In my experience, people/companies would like to register for the conference early-on, to take advantage of the early-bird discounts. However they might not be sure who (which employee) will be available and can attend the conference. So most end up waiting till the end to book their seats.

This feels broken! It’s not good for the participants nor for the conference organizers.

To avoid this problem, we’ve introduced a new feature in the Agile India 2013 Registration System, which lets you register for the conference by just specifying the number of seats. You can defer adding the exact attendees’ details till 1 month before the conference.

Also you can always edit the attendees info, up-till 1 month before the conference.

(We need 1 month’s lead time to get the conference t-shirts, badges and other logistics in place.)

We have a number of exciting workshops that are taking place during Agile India 2013 conference. One of the workshops that we are really excited about is ‘The Fastest Learner Wins‘ by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

Both Mary and Tom are well known writers and speakers and probably need no introduction. Mary will be soon launching her new book ‘The Lean Mindset’ and will be sharing her some of her learnings during the course of this workshop.

We recently caught up with Mary and Tom and asked them a few questions to get a deeper understanding of what their workshop is about.

What does the title of your workshop ‘The Fastest Learner Wins’ mean?

Speed matters. Learning matters. Design matters. Speed, learning, and design – correctly balanced – are unbeatable.

Once upon a time, a company could hold on to its markets by doing what it had always done well. But today, a small group of smart people with a good idea can start up a new business anywhere in the world; they can leverage the internet and cloud computing to enter a market with a minimum amount of capital in a surprisingly short time. At first, these small upstarts are not seen as a threat by companies already in the market. But over time, the successful newcomers learn quickly and surprisingly often they have taken over whole markets with better, faster, cheaper offerings. The incumbents, caught in their successful past, usually find it’s too late to react.

What are the main ingredients that allow large companies to be able to sustain growth over time?

The average lifespan of a successful US company is about 15 years – much shorter than a career. This amazing fact might cause you to ask yourself: How can my company thrive over the long term? The answer is: Expect change and adapt to it. Our current organizations are strongly incentivized to continue doing whatever they have been doing in the past. But as companies grow large and the world changes, the only real path to sustained growth is innovation. The most innovative companies have learned to change their focus:

• From productivity to impact
• From predictability to experimentation
• From scalability to decentralization
• From making money to making a difference

What will be the key take away for the workshop attendees?

Attendees will learn strategies for improving their companies in the areas of:

1. Innovation
In a world where natural disasters and economic shocks have become routine, only the fast and flexible survive. Wise organizations devolve decision-making to the people who deliver value, sparking initiative and fostering innovation.

2. Design
If there is one thing we know, it’s that the consumer experience matters. Savvy organizations focus on the whole product and care deeply about the consumer experience. They balance empathy with data to deliver the WOW factor.

3. Learning
It is difficult for companies to innovate at the pace and scale of the market. Learning organizations run lots of experiments and keep what works. They leverage disciplined speed, system-level feedback, and validated learning.

4. Mastery
Great organizations set out to make a difference. They seek challenge rather than predictability. They foster effort over entitlement, mastery over success. They are disciplined, determined, and honest. And they keep on getting better.

Target Audience for workshop:
Managers, team leads, product owners, product managers, coaches – anyone who would like to rethink how to create winning products.

Some past talks by Mary:
2011 Agile and Beyond Conference – Opening Keynote – Mary Poppendieck
Competing on the basis of speed

Please do remember seats for this workshop are limited so book soon to avoid disappointment. http://booking.agilefaqs.com

If you had skipped adding attendees’ info or want to update their info, now we’ve a feature which will allow you to accomplish this.

Under your Account Details page, you’ll see something like this

The rest is obvious I guess.

Things that the participants liked/worked well:

Speakers

• Diversity among the speakers was fantastic. (148 expert practitioners from 18 Countries)
• Speakers from various parts of the world made the conference very rich and most of them were hands on people. discussions were very productive.
• Good mix of presenters – experienced vs. practicing, Indian vs. International, etc.
• Speakers mix (national and international both). Great variety of speakers
• Great agile spirit presented in Naresh’ welcome speak 🙂
• None of the talks were marketing oriented.
• Majority of the time, folks with Hands-on experience (and not academicians) were speaking
• More participation from Agile practitioners than Agile Sellers
• Calibre of local Bangalore speakers was excellent. I had no idea we had such high-quality speakers in India
• High quality and moving key note session from Freeset.
• Good setup for the review of speakers and the fact that speakers were chosen months before the conference started. It could have been better, but it was a good experience for me.
• Mix of people from start ups and great organizations(This helps us understand the people with core knowledge and also the people who define the trend).
• Good to interact with quality speakers from all over the world
• Large number of non-Indian / non-US speakers that speaks about the diversity of Agile implementations.
• Most of the speakers were fantastic. Frankly best technical conference I have attended in Bangalore.
• International quality speakers (people invited from around the world)

Program/Content

• The proper amalgamation of workshop, practice talk, introductory talk and expert talk
• Variety of experienced topics and amount to practitioner topics where people shared real experience rather than how it should have been textbook gyaan.
• It covered most of the Agile aspects & most of the sessions were interesting.
• Spoiled for choice. Had a difficult time choosing which session to attend.
• Workshops were very effective and engaging
• No frills – No ceremonial processes such as introduction, session chair, summery etc.
• Lightning talks gave a forum where young speakers could also get a chance to talk
• Research Presentations and experience reports were very good
• Conference consisting of Various tracks (Leadership, Experience..).
• Great to hear the individual experiences(Experience report)
• Three streams going in parallel (introductory, practicing & expert)
• Mix of various topics from leadership to programming practices.
• Having workshops where people could “feel” the topic and learn quickly

Audience

• Participants across multiple cultures, countries, companies.. (750 participants from 21 countries working for 230 odd companies..wow!)
• Quality of Audience (attracted the right mix of people – hard-core techies, managers, company owners, etc)
• Opportunity to see what is happening outside India not having to travel outside India.
• Lots of smart people. I was learning constantly, whether I was in a session or networking outside.
• The volume of discussions, it’s a choice within a choice. A must have going forward.
• Excellent selection of tracks and organization by stages
• Excellent networking opportunities
• Almost all the attendees were very collaborative
• I was blown away by the passion of the organizers and participants
• Looking at the crowd, I could not believe this was being held for the first time
• Wide spectrum of participants brought good cultural mix
• Excellent and very knowledgeable and participative attendees who added value to the talks
• The crowd – amazing global audience
• Opportunity to meet & interact with people from different organizations
• Good Q&A
• The speakers to delegate ratio was fantastic.

Logistics

• Personal attention given to take care of every need of the speakers by the organizers from the beginning was something I’ve never seen in any other conferences and logistics were up to standard.
• Great turnout – the conference is eventually known by the enthusiasm and feedback from its attendees, even more than the lineup of speakers.
• And off-course the enthusiasm of volunteers and the punctuality was superb
• Organizing the whole program, guess no single Talk/Session was changed, cancelled or rescheduled.
• Attention to details – best organized conference attended so far
• Excellent Event Management
• Keep up the good location!! That means a lot for a conference:-)
• Good event handling, lot’s of information everywhere. Nice location (although a little pricy for non-speakers).
• Good website with lots of relevant information (especially the program). Good use of social media (blogs, twitter) before the conference.
• Meticulous arrangements. Began and ended on the dot for most part.
• Detailed Schedule Was provided to each participants, so that they could clearly schedule their time !!
• Several tracks –so we had the chance to opt out of Non interesting sessions.
• Thank you! I really enjoyed be part of the conference. I really appreciate: Good speakers, Friendly people around and Tasty food
• Information flow – right from pre conference mails, to the finish. Hence, there was no confusion.
• Simplicity of it all – the participants, the organizers, the content.
• Choice of venue – centrally located, easy to access, spaces that were created within…be it the coffee shop, boardroom, open space etc
• By and large, the whole event management was extremely smooth. I didn’t come across any major issues.
• Three days was actually a good length of the conference. Agile 2011 at Salt Lake City felt long, but this was the right size. My personal opinion is to retain the format.
• Organization – Right from the submissions till the agile program guide sent a day ahead
• Time management – On dot start and ending of sessions.
• Timeliness – All sessions were held as per the schedule
• Display of Topic Info on each conference room entrance.
• Greatly appreciate all the hard-work and passion of organizers
• Collaboration with the vendors. The booth space could use improvement, but the ability to talk in-depth with them was helpful.

What could be improved:

Speakers

• The star speakers with big names and titles did not offer much – they were regurgitating old stuff; whereas I found the young practitioners had more to say….
• Time Management from some Speakers were not proper. Most of the time, because of shortage of time, the crux of the session was expedited or never discussed.
• Some of the sessions had very open ended discussions & workshops which could be more informative & address some agile related issues.
• Better panel discussion ( they got the right members but the discussion was not good enough)
• Workshops conducted in the limited time were very superficial, they should be made more effective in the available time or dropped
• There were 3-4 talks which I attended where the speaker had to rush through the slides as the initial slides took more time than anticipated.
• Couple of speakers did not have appropriate presentation skills
• Quality of some sessions (some sessions were particularly under-prepared, even though the topic itself could deserve more attention; pay attention to speaker quality)
• The way some workshops were conducted. Some speakers just presented what the audience came up with suggestions without correcting those suggestions. There were totally wrong suggestions came from audience but speakers never corrected them. The bad thing about this is that rest of the audience accepted those suggestions as correct.
• Some of the stage producers should not disturb the presenter while they are doing the presentation(this doesn’t mean that they cant share there ideas)
• Expert speakers should talk in the beginning and in the end to hold the crowd.

Program/Content

• Too many streams…it was very difficult to choose what to select.
• Problem of Plenty ! It was not possible to attend all the interesting talks.
• Too many good sessions in same slots..I could not be everywhere 🙂
• Number of tracks – every track was interesting and it was really hard to choose one for a specific slot
• 7 tracks was not a good thing. At least not when the 7 tracks had kind of the same audience. If a conference has a track for .NET, one for Java, one for managers and one for testers it’s a different story.
• Reduce number of parallel tracks
• We had 6-7 parallel sessions. This made the choice of picking up the most relevant sessions a bit difficult for attendees. We need to re-look at how many sessions we should have in future conferences
• Too many tracks; to be precise 7 tracks running at the same time. Ideally 4 would have been a good number.
• 2 days of conference would be plenty – but perhaps 1 day extra for workshops/certifications?
• Experience sharing sessions were boring
• Scheduling interesting talks in the same time(although i agree about the value proposition)
• Session duration should not be more that 45-60mins
• Scheduling – Not having time to get between sessions
• Some sessions could have more content & concrete experiences related to retro, planning, review etc
• Would love to have more keynote sessions
• Speakers and hence the contents should go several reviews. There were few sessions that were totally cumbersome.
• Not much take-aways. Most of us are agile practitioners,so it did not help much when a few speakers just explained stuffs on Agile. Some best approaches with real-life results/some kind of workshops should be better. Research approach was good, but yet, it was more explaining again on Agile. Everyone knows a successful agile implementation needs Self-organized teams. These things should have been reviewed before are taken up in conference agenda.
• Too many introductory talks, we would expect a large number of people already practicing agile and lean so we could cut down on that and focus on extended research on improvement and experiences with both.
• The open space wasn’t well utilized
• Lightning talks should have been more prominent
• Some of the Sessions were repetitive (Ex: Track 7 – Using Lean practice in Agile Fixed Bid Project, Implementation of Lean Concepts….. An Industrial Case Study, they was just the same)
• Not many hands-on development workshops, more talks.
• Back to back sessions resulted in a few presenters getting less time ( a major problem for half hour sessions)
• Selection of papers needs improvement. Some presentations were not engaging enough.
• Lot of repetition. May be this is good for new comers. But someone like me who has been attending AgileIndia meets, found the same story being repeated for the past 6+ years
• Coaches Corner and Open Space were a good idea, but were a little too free form which prevented consistent benefit from the forums

Audience

• Maybe this is trivial. Maybe the Veg food was more to balance out the expenses uniformly. But i heard someone remark on only veggie food…people perceptions.
• Audience was too noisy sometimes in most the sessions. (Specially when it comes to a workshop), I was wondering whether they understood the difference between a ‘discussion’ and ‘just talking’. This made me bit difficult to get the maximum of some workshops.
• Maybe trim down the numbers to 600, so that sessions are not so crowded
• Some folks from sponsor stall where quite reluctant to talk to people who might not look like their potential customers.
• Movement of attendees from one room to another (shopping around syndrome!) – Were the speakers not doing good? or were the participants restless? Don’t know.
• Some rooms are fully packed and found it difficult to follow what was happening

Logistics

• Every other room than Coronet was almost always overflowing (can we view this as tremendous success for the conference??)
• Some sessions we had to stand and couldn’t participate as much as we would like to have.
• A small thing was the bad internet connection on the Wi-Fi. But as you said, it was arranged in the last minute. Perhaps it should have been a focus area early on.
• Venue had multiple floors that just made things confusing
• Bigger conference rooms
• There were no chairs sometime and had to stand throughout the session. Seating arrangement could have been more dynamic seeing attendees.
• It would be good to keep the conference on weekdays, leaving weekends for family time
• The tea coupons were not even asked for. Probably, we can save printing those
• 3 days was bit long…..
• First day registration (tag at one place, kit bag in another place far away…) could be improved
• Room sizes (one of the room I was speaking ‘Utsav’ was very small. People were standing for most past)
• Some rooms ware small to accommodate the people due to the popularity of the topic (e.g. Utsav room)
• Share presentations from the talks sooner after the talk completes
• Conference Material in the form of url/cd will be good to have
• Not enough breakout sessions in between the presentations to interact with other speakers or attendees
• 5-10 mins break between sessions would help the transition.
• Distribution of tasks for organizing – some people were overloaded with most of the efforts
• Book stall did not have too many books on Agile. Moreover it was not there on Day 2 and Day 3
• No time between the sessions (it can be 5 mins at-least, had to literally run)
• I was looking for notepad, could have given with the bag
• There was no proper common meeting space between the talks. One room was far away from the rest of the rooms forcing people to choose between the two places
• Registration process was not at efficient, why should I register, then collect conference bag somewhere else? Then I also had to get schedule separately. It should all be in one place. First impressions last 🙂
• I had no idea where or who the stage producers or organizers, lack of visibility
• Found that many a sessions had a lot of people (beyond the capacity of the room), I know its quite difficult to control that, but something that we can try to improve upon.
• More Parallelization during registration of participants
• Some people had to stand, some interesting sessions were given smaller rooms.
• The seating arrangements was different in different rooms – will have preferred the table with 10 seats layout across all rooms to foster better interactivity between the attendees
• Lack of immediate feedback forms for the attendees to assess whether they got value from the session they attended
• The signage at the conference needs to be improved and in place prior to attendees arriving.
• I want black, strong, coffee and tea without milk.
• Internet connectivity. Wi-Fi worked well Friday PM, Saturday AM, and again Sunday PM, but I couldn’t use it most of the remaining time.

Based on this feedback, we’ve made the following improvements to Agile India 2013.