An AgileTribe Supper with Steve Forte
On 10 Sep 2013, Optimation hosted an AgileTribe supper at Everybody’s restaurant in Auckland. We invited a small number of agile practitioners from Auckland, with me hosting was Colart Miles (one of our business agility coaches at Optimation), and our guest of honour was Steve Forte – a successful serial entrepreneur, developer, MBA, and Scrum Alliance board member.
Steve, originally from New York and now living in Hong Kong, was in town speaking at the Microsoft TechEd conference, and this was a gift of an opportunity to get together with people we knew and trusted for an informal dinner. Because we opted for this format, rather than a talk followed by drinks, we were able to get into some really extended and interesting conversations; several going on at the same time. As you might expect, there were some common issues and concerns raised right around the table, so over the coming weeks, we’ll be penning a short series of related articles that explore what these mean and what people can do about them.
- Why mindsets need to change across the whole organisation to achieve sustained success
- How governance and product ideation need to slim down (a topic dear to my heart)
- The improvements that can come from applying lean and agile principles across the business
- The pain of scaling agile practices across portfolios and larger organisations
- Effective approaches to testing on agile projects (a hot topic for us at the moment)
Ahead of taking Steve to the restaurant, Colart and I met him at his hotel to interview him on video, and we will be releasing some of the topics raised from that too.
- Reaction to state of play in the America’s Cup
- Advice for Kiwi start-ups wanting to apply agile frameworks
- Elevator pitch for agile practices
- Attitude to SAFE, Enterprise Scrum, and other attempts to scale agile practices
- Favourite agile war story (the clean we could video)
- Approach for qualifying agile practitioners (certifications, experience, attitude, etc.)
Links to these blogs and videos on agile will be tweeted so follow @optimation on twitter to get the link.
Hosting such an event for the agile community was a great experience for us at Optimation, fulfilling one of my goals as the Agile Practices Director here, and building great relationships with local practitioners and an awesome international speaker. While Steve is a motivating speaker he also keeps it real! He seems to have a bottomless pit of stories that are interesting, inspiring, funny, and sometimes just too naughty to put in print. Steve is a true NZ rugby fan, so you might bump into him at the All Blacks vs Springboks game this weekend. Do try to get to see him at TechEd or one of the other talks he’s doing in the start-up community this week.
