I wanted to share here my impressions and feedback about AgileEnSeine. It is just a sum up of my key takeaways from this event.

A few words about why I attended to this event :

I’m always passionate about the agile methods and it’s been three years that I’ve prioritized AWS technical events over agile ones.

Honestly it is really very interesting to go out your head from your daily environment et and look around, it is inspiring, it gives you some ideas and sometimes let’s be honest comforting on your organization.

I’m just going to just talk about a few conferences/workshop I’ve attended

On the first day after the inspiring keynote given by Isaac Getz, i went to a workshop/Serious Game about the prioritization animated by Moïra Degroote. She promotes a system driven by value.

She is really focusing on the value, and to make people realize that the value is more important that give an accurate estimation.

So we started the workshop with a first estimation of the effort and then by the value. She gave us different kinds of estimation : tee-shirt size, ski slope… and she put the focus on the cognitive bias we use during the estimation. We are « programmed » to put an accurate value on tasks where the meaning/value is no longer in the discussion. Her advice is to give more place to the collaboration between business and the development team, and not only be focused on an accurate estimation.

She is energetic and knows to make her audience questioning oneself! She also reminded us what’s matter for our client via the model Kano.

As a manager, I just can’t tell to the product team that we can’t estimate a task, we need to planify the projects and their delivery. But we need to collaborate more and design the product together with the business. She reminded us what is really matter.

The second conference I found interesting was the one talking about the solution focus method animated by Natixis (Jean-Marie Froux Pascal Merin). They gave an insight of being solution focus by a simple way of questioning your team. « Imagine… »

We had an example of a failed delivery, and in the first scene we had a conversation between the project manager and his manager, the project manager enumerated all the things that went wrong, and gave the justification on why things went wrong.

On the second part, the manager just ask :  » Imagine that delivery went well, what would be the situation, the consequences… ». Then we focus on the resources we had already, what we want, what’s working already etc….

It is just a way of thinking and change the mindset.

With this method we don’t focus on the root cause, but we explore in detail the things we want to have and the resources/skills we already have and can use.

Obviously it is not a new approach but the way they presented in this conference was really interesting and I need to keep it in mind every day.

The last one a really enjoyed was the one with Eduardo Alvim. To be honest I’am not a big fan of Safe. But his both talk was really interesting. He talked about the KPI in safe in a first session and in a second one, he shared about all the anti-pattern we shouldn’t use if we go through Safe.

Eduardo is the storyteller, he knows via some simple story how to keep his audience captivated on key topics.

I’m not going to put here all his recommendations and his inputs, but there are pretty obvious :

Have a system thinking perspective to define the metrics

Identify the most appropriate metrics to our context

Generate date, make interpretations and use to improve our system

…

To conclude, these three days were really interesting and would be useful !