The Craft-based Profession : Agile 2011 Sprint 1

Last year I wrote about How to Lead with Agile-ity. Lessons from the 2010 Agile Leadership workshop in Melbourne .
This year the Agile 2011 Conference took place over 2 days in Sydney on 15 and 16 June.

So what was interesting?

Some highlights if you’re in a hurry:

• The discussion for and against the craft-based profession.
• The convergence of Agile with Lean Startups and Continuous Deployment.
• The opposing views of Dr Alistair Cockburn and Martin Fowler.
• Agile creates early learning which drives risk mitigation vs. waterfall increasing risk.
• The introduction of the International Consortium for Agile.
• The huge adoption and maturing of Agile in Australian companies, from online tech to major corporates.
• Telstra’s investment in Agile and the adoption impact this will have on the vendor and service provider market.
• Leaders discussing practical Agile Leadership challenges.
• Agile leading cultural change.
• I was surprised by the low adoption of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and others during the conference compared to similar events I’ve attended. The realtime stream was relatively quiet. I did my bit here.

You can see the social media activity here, the schedule of speakers here and the slides that were presented here.

The Craft-Based Profession

[ff @TotherAlistair] The keynote by Dr Alistair Cockburn, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto worked through the model of Invent, Communicate and Decide.

Invent

focused on adjusting the process according to the number of people and project criticality,

Communicate

spoke to the concept of the Whiteboard providing stickiness over time as a benefit over voice only communication. Alistair suggested using video to bridge the non co-location gap, and

Decide

introduced the controversial concept that we’re in a craft based profession.
(Martin Fowler and some speakers strongly disagree with the ‘craft’ concept.) Alistair believes we should develop our craft beyond ‘just programming’. Keeping to this theme, he believes that the levels of mastery of the craft could be modelled on

the principles of Kanji,

Shu

learn the craft and ‘Leave the shu box’. Pun intended and coined by Alistair.

Ha

collect incremental skills and continuously improve your skill, and

Ri

invent and blend techniques by continuously enhancing and contributing to the craft.

He discussed the mismatch between Ri and Shu people, but how each type of skill is required for a successful team.

This led to a discussion centered on Lean Principles[ff @ericries] and a theme of continuous delivery to reduce inventory in motion and balance the flow of output.
My observation is that it’s interesting to see Agile practices rapidly converging with Lean Startup principles. This created a lot of debate through the conference, both by the speakers and the attendees.
[ff @martinfowler]

Martin Fowler feels that craft implies expensive and niche and therefore does not like the craft analogy. I tend to agree with Alistair.

Next Post : Agile 2011 Sprint 2: Early vs Late Learning