Category Archives: Talks

After a great talk on Saturday in Montreal, I had the opportunity to follow it up on Monday by doing my “€œEffective Collaboration during a Sprint”€ talk at the AgileTour 2010 Quebec event. Today was an exciting day! How did the presentation go? Personally, I think it went pretty well. But if you want more details, you need to read on!

On Saturday October 23rd, I spoke at the AgileTour Montreal conference. I did my “€œEffective Collaboration during a Sprint”€ talk translated to French. Did I live up to my promise of the previous blog post? How did it go? To find out, you need to read on…

The TD Developer Network community was looking for a guest speaker for their annual event to deliver a talk to give the developers an introduction to Agile. My director recommended they get in touch with me and the next thing I knew; they invited to be the featured speaker at their annual event held in three different locations. To learn more about my TDDN adventures please read on…

Today was a good news/bad news day… The good news today was the organizers accepted my submission for the AgileTour Montreal conference. The bad news is I did a dry run of that talk at the monthly Agile Montreal meeting and came out with the feeling that I bombed. It is probably not as bad as it seemed, but to know what happened, please read on to find out.

This past week was crazy for me for a lot of different reasons, some of which I’ll blog about later this month. The story of this week started at the end of March when I was asked if I would be interested in doing some agile talks for some of the IBM Labs in the mid-west cluster. I offered up some abstracts for some of my existing talks to the labs and let them decide if they wanted something out of those or if they would like me to create something new. They all wanted some combination of my existing stuff… They settled on dates a few weeks ago and this week, off to Austin, Dallas and Phoenix I went to give 4h workshops. How did it go? I could tell you here, but really, I would like it much more if you would just read on… 🙂

CASCON was a lot of fun. Me and one of the other co-authors, Elizabeth, prepared the slide deck as well as some exercises for the participants to do. It was an interesting experience to take the material from the book and twist it this way to get a different results. Personally, what I liked about it was that it actually helped me clear up some things or find some additional pros/cons to add to the chapters during the final edit cycle. There’s nothing like having the material out there staring at you from a Powerpoint slide to get you realize the gaps in what you wrote. I suggested that we stop the editing process and put the entire book in PPT format before going any further… I got vetoed on that idea… Of course, I was just joking around when I made that suggestion.

The talk was about how distributed teams should approach their Daily Scrums. The first part of the talk focused on the goals of the meeting and what teams should try to accomplish with the meeting. Why did I start there? Well, these days, I’m attending daily scrums for 2 or 3 different teams and I find it fascinating to see how teams handle their meetings and the information team members bring to it. Really, the goal of the meeting should be to make sure the team is focused on their sprint plan, make sure everyone is communicating what they are doing and passing along information about their tasks that may impact others on the team. Teams starting out struggle to understand this and their meetings usually resemble more of a daily status report than anything else. The second part of the meeting spoke more about the different types of distributed teams and how teams can meet to do their Daily Scrums as well as approaches that distributed teams with no overlapping work hours can take to successfully conduct their Daily Scrums despite the challenges they face.