Agile Boot Camp, Sept 17 2010
Central London September 17th 2010
This is a workshop to explore the idea and practice of agility. It will combine serious content with seriously playful experience of agile using improv activities.
Who is this workshop for?
Anyone who wants to find ways to increase the creativity and responsiveness of their business.Why agile?
We are moving from a linear industrial model characterised by command and control to a networked model characterised by participation, collaboration.Disruptive change is difficult within organisations because big business works hard to maintain the status quo.
Agile offers a way of working that keeps companies close to their markets and facilitates change.
What is agile ?
Agile is a mindset as much as a set of principles. It was developed in the software industry. We'll explore how the broad principles of the Agile Manifesto can be applied to wider business.1 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Corporate ritual often places high value on organisational processes, habits, technologies. And low value on things that individuals enjoy and derive value from - relationships, conversation, play, interaction. Consider the frustration of most 'customer service' programmes which are set-up to suit the organisation, not the customer.
2 Valuing incremental product development and learning - not corporate ritual
Standard practice places high value in inputs - productivity, documentation, meetings. Yet it is
more important to measure / focus on the working outputs.
Agile requirements are barely sufficient. Requirements are captured at a high level so not everything is detailed upfront. This allows for swift adaptation and minimises the time spent on anything that doesn't actually form part of the end product. The output is therefore highly relevant to the needs of the end user.
3 Customer / supplier / employee collaboration over contract negotiation and corporate hierarchy
The value that can be obtained through low-friction collaboration toward a common goal is often greater than that which can be obtained through tying relations up in over-detailed contractual relationships or organisational hierarchies.
Peter Drucker said "In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts". Dan Pink pointed out that 'management' is an invented technology from the 1850s, and that "management leads to compliance, but only self-direction leads to engagement".
4 Responding to change over following a plan
Typical business processes establish a plan and an objective, and then execute that plan. Rewards and incentives are focused around how well that plan is executed. Once the plan has been agreed by the business, it becomes a commandment, taking no heed of changing circumstances. If the plan needs to change this is a cumbersome, laborious and often painful process.
Much management time is spent creating artificial or virtual value (justifying change, reporting, fulfilling corporate ritual), rather than generating real value (ideas, innovation, business outputs). If the plan doesn't work, you don't find out until the plan is complete. If the plan is no longer what the market requires, you don't find out until the plan is complete. By then, it is too late, and you have no time to adapt the plan to deliver a more fulfilling and successful end product.
Agile has preference for betas / rapid prototyping and iteration: the idea of chunking down big ideas and long timescales to smaller pieces which might adapt and change in response to a changing environment.
What we'll cover in the workshop
Two big themes:
1. We'll explain the main tenets of agile working, including practical examples of how it has worked for different organisations. We explore he value of rapid, iterative prototyping over grand strategy. We'll look at how to break out of process sclerosis and reignite the power of personal relationships in growing business.
2. We'll use practical activities and games to help you get direct experience of what it's like to work in an agile way.
Your hosts
Neil Perkin is the founder of Only Dead Fish, a digital and media consultancy that specialises in applying strategic understanding of social and emerging media technologies to help businesses innovate, become more agile, and optimise their effectiveness within the new, networked communications environment.
He has have over 20 years' media owner experience and was latterly the Director of Marketing and Strategy for IPC Media, the largest consumer publisher in the UK and publisher of multimedia brands including Wallpaper, Marie Claire and theNME. In this capacity he ran award-winning strategy, planning and consumer insight functions and was at the centre of defining and implementing the digital strategy for one of the largest media owners in the UK.
He's a regular keynote speaker across Europe on content strategy, emerging media, digital commercial strategy and social technologies, and writes on these subjects for BrandRepublic, FutureLab, New Media Age, Marketing Week,Mediatel and Canvas8 amongst others. He's been active in the social media space for a number of years and is an associate of The Futures Agency, a collaboration of some of the world's leading media thinkers and futurists. For people who like shiny things, he's won more industry awards than just about anyone in UK media, with five awards to my name including a Campaign Award, two Media Week Awards and an Association of Online Publishers award.
Johnnie Moore's first job was as a speechwriter for Lord Sainsbury. After this he moved to advertising, first as a copywriter and then as an account planner. He started his own a la carte agency in 1988 specialising in financial services marketing.
In recent years, he has developed a coaching and facilitation practice, and has worked in Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada and the US as well as the UK. Projects have ranged from intensive teambuilding programes to Open Space conferences. Clients have included NPR, the BBC, Channel 4, CNN, Bovis, Johnson & Johnson, O2, PwC and Worldvision.
Johnnie has contributed chapters to the books Open Space and Beyond Branding. He's the subject of the first chapter of John Winsor's book Spark, on practitioners in organisational creativity. He's a founder member of the Applied Improv network.
A blogger since 2004, he posts frequently on topics connected with facilitation and effective collaboration.
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