I’m honored to be the featured speaker at the January 28, 2010 meeting of the Phoenix Scrum User Group.  I’ll be making a presentation called “Doing Agile Isn’t the Same as BEING Agile!”  The presentation is loosely based on my blog entry “Agile antipattern: Doing Agile!“  If you are in the Phoenix area please stop by on the evening of the 28th and introduce yourself.  The basic abstract for the presentation is below. Go to the Phoenix Scrum User Group home page for more details (should be updated soon).

Doing Agile Isn’t the Same as BEING Agile

People often say “We’re doing agile at my company.”  What does that really mean?  Unfortunately it usually means the organization has picked a small number of agile practices they attempt to do without really paying attention to the overall results.  If a company is “doing agile well” it may even mean they are doing as many agile practices as possible.  However, in practice there is a big difference between “doing agile” and “being agile!”  Companies BEING Agile perform better than companies doing agile.  They see higher morale among their employees.  They use Agile as a tool rather than a process.  Most importantly, being Agile means being devoted to the principles which drive success rather than hoping the practices will drive success.  Whether you are using XP, Scrum, AUP, Crystal or another agile methodology come learn the basic principles and how to internalize them so your team, organization or enterprise can BE agile rather than DO agile!

Related posts:

1. The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile presentation from Agile 2009 This presentation was originally given at Agile 2009 in Chicago.  Richard Lawrence...
2. New to agile? Look at some of our presentations My experiment with SlideShare on Tuesday seemed to go well, so I uploaded...

My experiment with SlideShare on Tuesday seemed to go well, so I uploaded several more presentations.  You will see the most recent 4 in the sidebar on the blog page, but I also created a new Presentations page on the website.  You can get to it at www.agileforall.com/presentations.  It has all of the presentations available in one place and as we give presentations I’ll try to remember to keep uploading them there.

Until next time I’ll be Making Agile a Reality^® by working on more presentations for 2010!

Related posts:

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This presentation was originally given at Agile 2009 in Chicago.  Richard Lawrence and I wanted to give teams a bit of hope if they weren’t quite doing agile.  In order to do that we gave a presentation helping them understand some of the basic issues.  However, we also recognize every organization is different.  We didn’t want to give cookbook answers when the kitchen wasn’t always the same.  So instead we gave attendees a way to help reach resolution on their problems.  This is based on the Thinking Process from the Theory of Constraints.  Below is the presentation from SlideShare.  It mentions creating clouds as exercises.  You can download the handout given to attendees in order to learn this for yourself.  If you want to download the presentation please email me.  I would rather send you the file directly.  My email is in the sidebar to the right.

Related posts:

1. Agile antipattern: Treating symptoms not causes Agile teams often get to a point where they have a number...
2. New to agile? Look at some of our presentations My experiment with SlideShare on Tuesday seemed to go well, so I uploaded...
3. New to agile? What to do when you are behind Wow, has it really been more than a month since I posted...