In this slice about inspiration from Agile 2009, I will write about the inspiring elements from different sessions and discussions with other participants. It will be more facts than thoughts and trends (I will cover that in later blog posts, slicing the Agile 2009 conference).

For me, the primary source of inspiration was from the workshops involving some kind of games. Games can be a great way to learn about different practices, principles and tools. Especially because they don't have elements from your daily work, so the collaboration between the participants often will be much better and focus on the complete team, a shared goal and not specific roles (well, well, I know we have all those agile cross functional teams…but…).

I went to The Business Value Game with Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. It was a game about how to deliver maximum business value, prioritization, estimate business value and collaboration between different roles. The session was a bit chaotic with too many people in the room, but it got some really interesting concepts. It was also interesting to see how people got engaged in the game. I observed many people focusing quite a lot on learning the game rules and less on optimizing the business value. For example in my team, we did not talk about remove stories from the game to release more frequent, but tried to maximize the delivery of ALL stories. Maybe it was because the session had too many people and we did not have the time to think on that strategy, but it might also be a pattern in many real teams?

The Business Value Game

Portia and Pascal also facilitated the The Bottleneck Game, and some of my colleges from BestBrains went to that workshop. It was a game about options, Theory of Constraints, System Thinking and collaboration on a common goal. It is a great way to learn those agile and lean techniques. I will defiantly use this game with different teams.

I also went to The Kanban Game with Tsutomu Yasui. It was also a workshop with too many people and it took some time before we had enough problems to manage in the iterations of the game. After the first iteration it got more interesting and had some good elements. I think the game could be much better, by not having the first iteration and maybe facilitate the usage of different Kanban elements.

The Kanban Game

Another fun and inspiring workshop was May the Forces Be With You, Exploring the Forces Driving and Restraining Agile with Rod Claar and Douglas Shimp. We created two teams, the Drivers and the Restrainers and had to present different forces in a humoristic way for some selected judges. It was a fun way to explore the forces driving and restraining agile

May the Forces Be With You

"Flirting" With Your Customers with Jenni Dow and Ole Jepsen was a fresh way of looking at the customer relationship using 8 steps to build a good customer relationship. It was fun and interesting.

Flirting With Your Customers

The last session I will include in this slice, was a workshop, First, kill all the Metrics!, with Niel Nickolaisen and Chris Matts. We talked about many potential meaningful metrics, but did not find some really good examples in my group. I might reflect more on this area in a later Agile 2009 slice.

First kill all the Metrics!

Talking with other participants were also fund and inspiring, but I did not had the time to talk with enough people. It was inspiring to hear agile and lean stories from the trenches around the world, even though many people and teams seem to struggle with retrospectives and problem solving techniques.