A bit late, but I did attend the event  mentioned in the previous post. It was time truly well spent. So here is the report, with a bit of opinion thrown in.

The highlights were the talks by Dr Wintersteiger and Mr Tathagat Verma.

Dr Wintersteiger gave a very interesting talk on the landscape and development of this whole Agile business, around the world, including India. One of the key points is how the management approaches are still very 20th Century, while the behaviour as well as aspirations  of organisations, teams and indeed the younger generation of people is very different. How seating and office ambience is very different. This got some people thinking and there were questions during the panel discussion I’ve mentioned Lynda Gratton’s recent book. This discusses the changing nature of work and makes some predictions (not all of them brand new) and offers a sane way forward. Worth a read, even though I think the LBS fraternity generally tends to provide examples from large pedestrian and traditional companies. Q n A session at the end of Dr Wintersteiger’s talk was absorbing (yours truly asking many questions)

Tathagat’s talk was very interesting. Generally when people talk about/of Agile, I tend to go into an semi-slumber, often punctuated by mild irritation and sometimes dislike.  For a change it was a an enjoyable and informative talk. Excellent examples, context setting and explanations. Not common at all these days. I even learnt something very useful. He (With help of Linda Rising) explicated what is meant by mindset and what a mindset constitutes of. This word is used commonly but without a lot of understanding (A bit like ‘agile’, eh?) .  He compared the fairly opposing mindset of companies/people. This understanding is actually very critical. I hope everyone is better for this.

The rest of the conference was fairly decent, with Mr Nitin Dhall giving a very nice talk and honest (hence useful) QnA at the end. I’ve not attended a lot of other talks (which may very well have been wonderful) as I was busy talking to people whose interests overlap with mine.

Ciao

 

P.S: I’m about to give a talk at an internal conference and have half a mind to report on this as well.  But then I think enough of general reports, I’ll see if I can write on a particular problem/area soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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