What is Business Value?

The next Agile Ottawa meeting is on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at The Code Factory. This discussion topic is Business Value; a particularly interesting topic since the Agile backlog revolves around the Product Owner prioritizing the highest business value. While some see a clear path for determining business value, other people perspectives are often different.

Product Owners, team members, Scrum Masters, and Project Managers will all learn something new as the group explores this topic. We are very fortunate to have Paul Relf leading the discussion. Paul is at Nortel where he leads a team of Product Owners in a new and innovative product space.

Don’t Do Agile Slides

The slides from the Agile Ottawa meetup on November 10th, 2009 are now available. Interesting session!

Learning Best Approaches for your Brain Slide Deck

The slide deck from the October Agile Ottawa meeting is now online. You can find the link in Mark’s post found here.

Don’t Do Agile

Tim Bacon will be talking this month about the focus in an Agile rollout is the change required and not so much on “Agile”. This will be an exciting discussion and will certainly give pause to think of Agile in a different light.

Tim specialises in assisting teams or organisations to introduce Agile software development methods such as Scrum or XP. He is a passionate “people person” and an advocate of test driven development and software craftsmanship, with over a decade’s experience working with software development teams in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Tim enjoys his work most when helping teams to see that they can produce more and better software with less stress.

Time and Date: Tuesday November 10^th: Networking from 6:00 – 6:30; Presentation from 6:30 to 8:00

Location: the Code Factory (2nd Floor – 246 Queen Street), you need to buzz for the elevator.

Agile Ottawa is a group for anyone interested in Agile Software Development in the Ottawa region. The group organizes events the 2^nd Tuesday of every month at the Code Factory (2nd Floor – 246 Queen Street) – events usually begin at 6:30pm.

How to Communicate so your Clients will Remember

Mark Levison is presenting this month at Agile Ottawa. Reprising his Agile 2009 talk/workshop, this will be a fun evening looking at a much different side of Agile. The following from his blog…

I’m presenting at Agile Ottawa this month. The presentation is a reprise of my Agile 2009 session:

“Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain”.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights into what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:

• Lead with the Abstract
• Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
• Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
• Rewards don’t work
• High Fructose Corn Syrup

Benefits:

• Students and Mentees will remember
• Learn how to correct mistakes
• Workshop Attendees will stay awake

Time and Date: Tuesday October 13^th: Pizza + Networking from 6:00 – 6:30; Presentation from 6:30 to 8:00

Location: the Code Factory (2nd Floor – 246 Queen Street), you need to buzz for the elevator.

Agile Ottawa is a group for anyone interested in Agile Software Development in the Ottawa region. The group organizes events the 2^nd Tuesday of every month at the Code Factory (2nd Floor – 246 Queen Street) – events usually begin at 6:30pm.

2009-2010 Kickoff Meetup

Hello all, I hope you all had a great summer, weather notwithstanding!

We’re pleased to announce our schedule for the coming season. The meetings are going to be held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month, so mark the following dates: September 8th, October 13th, November 10th, December 8th, January 12th., February 9th, March 9th, April 13th, May 11th, and June 8th.

Our season kick-off meeting will be Tuesday, September 8th at 7:00 PM at The Clocktower Pub, 575 Bank St., Ottawa. This will be an informal gathering allowing everyone to get to know each other a bit, considering that we have a large number of new faces in the group!

Hope to see you all there!

Informal Meetup

An Agile Ottawa informal meetup has been planned for Monday June 15th at the Clocktower Pub at 575 Bank St.  Meeting time is 7PM. Come enjoy a pint while discussing Agility in Ottawa!

May Agile Meetup: Season Retrospective

For the Agile Ottawa May meeting we will be doing some self-reflection on the season 2009-2010 season. The retrospective, like many other Agile retrospectives, will be to look back on the season ending with this meeting and look at what we did well, what we need to improve, and in this case what we want to become.

There are many Agile User Groups across the country and indeed across the globe. Some are very small and informal. Some are very (very!) organized and formal — with board of directors, membership fees, many professional speakers, training, etc.

With the broad spectrum of choice in front of us, we, as a team, would like to come up with a plan and structure for next season.

Some questions to reflect upon before arriving at the meeting:

• How formal to we want to be?
• Do we want membership fees?
• Who do we want to appeal to? New Agile people? Old hat? Both?
• What kind of organizing body should we or could we put in place to make this happen?

Over the coming couple of weeks I am sure many more questions will come to mind. Consider the above the teasers. We have an opportunity to build something new, interesting, and valuable to the Agile community.

We look forward to having a record turnout as we discuss how to build the Agile community in the Ottawa region.

Correction…

Oops — off by a week. The Agile Meetup date is Tuesday, April 28th — not on the 21st as I so exuberantly published previously. Previous post updated with correct date.

Discussing Product Owner Role at April Meeting

This month we have an experienced Scrum Product Owner joining us. Paul Relf, has helped to implement Scrum at Nortel, will discuss his experiences learning about Agile and rolling out Agile on a large distributed project. Paul has also helped train other product owners.

We look forward to seeing you at the meeting at The Code Factory. Meeting will run from 6-8PM on Tuesday, April 28, 2009.