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August 18, 2005 
Using Agile Work Practices to Develop a Seminar
I've been working on developing a Agile Work Seminar to introduce teams to agile work. I'm using some Agile Work practices to develop it.
Iterative Delivery and Adaptive Planning
The seminar is going through drafts. Each draft will actually be delivered to a team. The first time through all the material was done at a small software consulting company five days ago. As a result of feedback from the people who participated, a revision will be made to the seminar... and then it will be delivered again (probably the next time will be in early September). This process allows me to refine the contents and presentation of the material.
Over time, I will be able to use Adaptive Planning to modify the contents and qualities of the seminar as circumstances change.
Test-Driven Work
I have set up criteria for the presentation in the form of an outline and learning objectives. The outline describes the major topics that must be directly covered such as the Agile Axioms or Corporate Culture. I have also set up "soft goals" such as that the seminar must include theory, history, practice and criticism of Agile Work. My first iteration met the outline tests, but did not meet the soft tests explicitly. The next version will.
Appropriate Metrics
This is an easy one: the success of this project will be its acceptance in the marketplace by having teams willing to pay the price for this seminar and then recommending it to others.
The Other Practices
Because this is essentially a one-man job, the other practices such as Self-Organizing Team and Maximize Communication are not as applicable.
Related articles can be found in the following categories:
Agile Case Studies
, Announcements
, Coaching
, Consulting
, Culture
, Howto
, Teams
I also maintain a page of references and recommended links to materials related to agile methods.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at August 18, 2005 08:32 AM
