Agile Forest

One of the first few comments to my partner after I touched down back into Brisbane last night was ‘Gosh I’m buggered. It’s been such a long week!’

He smirked at me and shyly commented ‘Monday was a public holiday. And you still have to work tomorrow.’

Was it really just two days? It felt like a whole week. All those late nights, lots of preparation, stress of going far out of my comfort zone and a hotel room only three floors away from a night club must have really pushed me hard!

I’m hopefully not going to write a long blog about all the ins and outs of the conference. I’ll let Craig do that as I saw the mountain of notes that he took and I’ll later take the lazy path and just link them. So what high level observations do I have:

1. Lots of people. Apparently over 650+. But as far as passionate people, it very much seemed like a small group. Watching twitter there was some movement but not a lot, maybe 20 or so consistent twitterers (is that a real word?) Now there would have been an element of passion to attend in the first place but there felt like little zeal.
2. Keynotes. I had seen something similar for Alistair Cockburn’s presentation before, probably on his blog, so there wasn’t much of a surprise there. It was the first time seeing Rob Thomsett and I had heard lots of people rave about it. I felt the raves were justified – his presentation was passionate, energetic and fun, albeit not covering the topic I thought it would. Side note Rob – the website you linked has broken pages *everywhere* in it. Jean Tabaka had some very cute ideas and some interesting links to books and websites. Unfortunately the links quoted weren’t right, but I eventually found some of it at http://www.gogamestorm.com/ and http://innovationgames.com/. I didn’t get to see too much of Martin Fowler as I left a little early to go back home.
3. Key themes. Its all about teams. Agile isn’t a methodology – its a significant culture upheaval, a revolution.
4. Best quote: Every time some does a Gantt chart a fairy dies.
5. Most relieving moment? Finishing my presentation! How mean was it making me be stressed the whole conference leaving it till the end? But seriously, I am so happy I did it and it was a considerable personal stretch. My presentation aims fulfilled – to have the most ‘out there presentation’, only stage jumper, getting through it without passing out. I wanted to be energetic and funny but I also wanted people to be able to take at least one thing out of it. Hopefully some people took away a better understanding that their transformational pattern actually has a name, behaviour and risks associated with it.

Thanks to my Suncorp ‘hood’ for your support on the day!