Photographs & AudioBoos from the Agile Business Conference 2009 and AgileCamp

All AudioBoos captured at the event can be found here.

Stephen Carver at the Agile Business Conference

Those who attended this year's Agile Business Conference were treated to a phenomenal keynote presentation from Cranfield's Stephen Carver who brought to life the problems faced by project and, separately, programme managers through an extended analogy with flight. The session integrated Battle of Britain strategy featuring an analogue intranet for the first time!, with the ups and downs of commercial airliners and Stephen even got delegates making their own paper aircraft for an 'end-of-session' flight test.

Here are some AudioBoo clips of Stephen's session including a brief interview.

Get Ready

Busying myself pulling together various threads ahead of this week's Agile Business Conference and AgileCamp events.

I'm parking my presentation here for safekeeping whilst I get other things moving:

Social Technologies Boost Agile Projects

View more presentations from Tim Difford.

Integrating Agile

Met some great people at yesterday's Integrating Agile conference at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. Organised by the Agile Consortium Benelux, the event featured a number of high-profile speakers and attracted Agile afficionados and those keen to learn from across Europe.

I encouraged the conference team to promote the use of the #iagile hashtag to enable delegates to discuss the event in real time using Twitter, and to share their thoughts with colleagues back in the office and around the world and beyond the Claus Conference Center (great venue btw!).

I can't beat Sander Nagtegaal's (Twitter @centrical) excellent summary of the event so please go to his blog to read it. Many others were tweeting so search #iagile to pick up some useful comments and links.

In the meantime, I managed to grab some photographs, audio and video from the event, so please enjoy and share as appropriate.

Here's the Flickr stream:




Here's an interesting Audioboo interview with Keynote speaker Rob Thomsett (btw within minutes of tweeting the link to this AudioBoo, Mark Rock (Twitter @markrock) - AudioBoo big cheese - commented that their own funky iPhone mini-podcasting software is the product of an Agile house - w00t!:




Here's a mix of videos from attendees and speakers. Look out for Rob Thomsett's take on Integrating Agile, plus Pete Measey on the event's introduction of CHANGE - the International Association for Business Agility. This exciting new venture is aimed at reinforcing a genuine understanding is what Agile is about in the business world... taking it way beyond its software development roots.

Integrating Agile

Just getting under way is the Integrating Agile conference. I'm here to participate, listen, learn, understand and interpret, but also to introduce an element of social media to the proceedings. No Qiking, but participants will be encouraged to tweet about the proceeeding using the #iagile hashtag. I'll also be using my trusty Kodak Zi6 for capturing quick interviews with some of the attendees and speakers. They'll be tagged in the same way.

Here goes looking forward to it.

Are Social Media tools the key to unlocking truly productive multi-location projects?

Can the face-to-face demands of collaborative team-working be replaced or simply augmented by Social Media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: onegreenerday @timdifford)

For those who couldn't make tonight's Social Media Cafe event (#smc_mcr) at The Northern in Manchester, here's a slideshare version of the presentation from my session. Without the commentary and interaction from the night it's not quite the same, so feel free to ask questions in the comments box or by following me on Twitter (@timdifford). For those who were there, these slides might be a useful aide memoire.


SlideShare Link

The Sweet Spot

I didn't even realise I'd sent a letter to the editor until someone mailed me and said they'd read my missive in this week's Computing. I'd actually commented on a blog which was spun off the Computing site. My comment got topped and tailed and turned into a Letter to the Editor in old world parlance. Anyway, all publicity is good publicity I suppose. It's worth perusing the actual blog post I commented on... as ever the IT world is obsessed with hardware and datacentres as the 'low hanging fruit' for green first movers with little thought as yet as to just how projects (green or otherwise) are delivered.

You can have non-green products delivered in a sustainable way OR green products delivered in traditional non-green ways. The sweet spot we're aiming for is where green products are also delivered using green and sustainable tools and delivery techniques.

This is where I was coming from at the Agile Business Conference and where I'll keep coming from as a I gather up Bright Green Solutions which hit this sweet spot.

Green Agile

I'm speaking at the Agile Business Conference today on Green Agile. As project delivery techniques Agile methods are a natural fit for the green and sustainable agenda as they already established, proven and green 'out of box' and place great emphasis on the reuse of software, hardware, tools, techniques and other artefacts.

Agile thinking also focuses strongly reducing waste by ensuring that teams share ideas and collaborate closely throughout the life of a project. The parallels with reduce, reuse and recycle messages which resonate throughout a media keen to demonstrate how we can all be greener in our daily lives are obvious.

Beyond today's Conference, the soon to launch IT Green Alliance will evolve Green Agile thinking and extend the focus of current green projects and programmes beyond hardware ('my server's more energy efficient than your server!') through software and on into business processes... ('it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it').

I'll keep you posted here... in the meantime get involved!