Agile 2014 – speaking and attending; a summary

So Agile 2014 is over again… and what an interesting conference it was.
What did I find most rewarding? Meeting so many agile people! My first conclusion was that there were experts like us agile consultants or starting agile coaches, ScrumMasters and other people getting acquainted with our cool agile world. Another trend I noticed was the scaled agile movement. Everybody seems to be involved in that somehow. Some more successful than others; some more true to agile than others.
What I missed this year was the movement of scrum or agile outside IT although my talk about scrum for marketing had a lot of positive responses.  Everybody I talked to was interested in hearing more information about it.
There was a talk maybe even two about hardware agile but I did not found a lot of buzz around it. Maybe next year? I do feel that there is potential here. I believe Fullstack product development should be the future. Marketing and IT teams? Hardware and software teams?  Splitting these still sounds as design and developer teams to me.

But what a great conference it was. I met a lot of awesome people. Some just entering the agile world; some authors of books I had read which got me further in the agile movement. I talked to the guys from Spotify. The company which is unique in its agile adoption / maturity. And they don’t even think that they are there yet. But then again will somebody ever truly BE agile ..?
I met the guys from scrum.inc who developed a great new scaled framework. Awesome ideas on that subject and awesome potential to treat it as a community created open framework; keep your eyes open for that!
I attended some nice talks too; also some horrible ones. Or actually 1, which should never have been presented in a 90 minute slot in a conference like this. But lets get back to the nice stories. Lyssa Adkins had a ‘talk’ about conflicts. Fun thing was that she actually facilitated the debate about scaled agile on stage. The session could have been better but the idea and potential of the subject is great.
Best session? Well probably the spotify guys. Still the greatest story out there of an agile company. The key take-out of that session for me is: agile is not an end-state, but a journey. And if you take it as serious as Spotify you might be able to make the working world a lot better. Looking at Xebia we might not even be considered to be trying agile compared to them. And that is meant in a humble way while looking up to these guys! – I know we are one of the frontiers of agile in the Netherlands. The greatest question in this session: ‘Where is the PMO in your model….’
Well you clearly understand this …
Another inspiring session was the keynote session from the CFO of Statoil about beyond budgeting. This was a good story which should become bigger in the near future as this is one of the main questions I get when implementing agile in a company: “how do we plan / estimate and budget projects when we go and do agile?” Beyond budgeting at least get’s us a little closer.
Long story short. I had a blast in Orlando. I learnt new things and met a lot of cool people.My main take out: Our community is growing which teaches us that we are not yet there by a long run. An awesome future is ahead! See you next year!