AIM Consulting recently sponsored and attended the 12th Annual Agile Open Northwest (AONW) conference in Seattle. AONW is an annual conference that focuses on agile practices and techniques, and utilizes an Open Space model which encourages its 300 participants to volunteer to speak on topics that interest them. The sold-out conference took place from February 5-7th at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall and the theme this year was “Stories from the Frontier”.
AIM Senior Consultant Barry Smith organized his own series of talks for the conference, including:
“Yoda, Agile and The Force: a discussion of learning and unlearning”
Anyone wanting to learn new agile skills can easily find a host of resources (books, training sessions, etc.) to help them learn new skills, but just as Luke Skywalker learned from Yoda, it’s not enough to learn a new skill. You must unlearn a lot of things you previously thought to be true.
“The 4 Obsessions of a Lean Product Owner”
Anyone working to be a capable/excellent product owner has many techniques and goals to keep in mind at any one time. Is there a simple framework to help them organize and prioritize the things they should be thinking about? In this session, the group worked in pairs and together to try to address how many different ideas could be fit into a single framework.
“Higgs Bosons and Agile PMO’s – do they both exist?”
The Higgs Boson was theorized decades ago, and no one has ever seen one. We only believe they exist because some experts told us they discovered them. Similarly, Agile PMO’s are talked about often, but seldom seen in practice. In this session Barry interviewed practitioners and discussed what the current state of the Agile PMO is.
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