Agile Belgium

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  • Agile Belgium Drinkup – December 2011

    Topic:

    This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

    Date:

    December 14, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

    You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar. When you are in the bar go as far as you can go at the back, you’ll find us there. It’s quieter there.

    The next one is a bit special as it’s the last one of 2011. It might be a good idea to retrospect on the previous editions and take decisions for 2012. So if you want to participate to the retrospective or if you just want to have a beer and talk Agile with some peers then join us!

    Add your name to the list to attend.

    Location:

    Delirium Café
    Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
    1000 Bruxelles

    Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

    See you there!

  • XP Days Benelux 2011 – Sold out

    XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

    The conference is now completely sold out. Hope to see you at the next “Mini XP Day”.

    Would you like to get an impression of the conference? Watch the video from XP Days Benelux 2010.

  • Agile Belgium Drinkup – November 2011

    Topic:

    This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

    Date:

    November 9, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

    You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar. When you are in the bar go as far as you can go at the back, you’ll find us there. It’s quieter there.

    Add your name to the list to attend.

    Location:

    Delirium Café
    Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
    1000 Bruxelles

    Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

    See you there!

  • Agile Belgium Drinkup – October 2011

    Topic:

    This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

    Date: October 12th, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

    You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar.

    Add your name to the list to attend.

    Location:

    Delirium Café
    Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
    1000 Bruxelles

    Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

    See you there!

  • Confessions of an ALE2011 attendee

    Last week I went to Berlin for the very first Agile Lean Europe conference.

    ALE2011 was one of the many ideas that originated during the World Café session hosted by Jurgen Appelo during XP2011 in Madrid.  As I’m a lazy fellow, I suggest you read the history of ALE2011 in this blogpost from Olaf Lewitz, instead of me writing it down.

    I was involved in the organisation of ALE2011 on the community sofa, and I can assure you this was a crazy adventure.  Planning a conference with more than 40 organizers can be quite chaotic!  But thanks to some natural leaders like Olaf & Marcin the chaos evolved into self organisation.  They shared their experience of organizing it during the conference in a session.

    On Tuesday evening I flew to Berlin after a day of work at my client’s office.  When I met the other participants in the hotel bar, I could already feel that this conference was going to be special.  There was excitement in the air.  Something new was going to happen!  I also understood the success of eXtreme Tuesday Club, when UK agilists explained me that this was exactly the format of XTC.  Having a good time together in a bar, drinking a beer and sharing stories.  This is why I believe the Agile Belgium Drinkups have a good future ahead of them.

    On Wednesday morning, the conference officially started with a warmup session by John Jagger.  He involved the entire audience in his cyber dojo, which was quite an achievement, knowing that there were more than 200 people in the room!

    Next was a keynote by Rachel Davies. I really like her style. Very down to earth and honest.  One message she brought was that Enterprise Agility may not be possible at all, a statement that I hear more often popping up in the community.  It was strengthened later in the conference by Brian Marick during his lighting talk, stating that we ‘Europeans’ can choose to quit these big enterprises and start up a business of our own.  Especially since we have a healthcare system 🙂

    In the afternoon Open Space, I proposed a session about healthy KPI’s, a problem I’ve been struggling with at clients.  Adopting agile is fine, but do we just keep our old KPI’s?  I feel that in most organisations theser are no longer suited and trigger the wrong behaviour.  We experimented a little bit with using trends instead of single point measurements, but without a good feeling.  On the last day, Dave Snowden reassured us during his keynote that KPI’s are not useful and should be left aside.  Maybe that’s a little harsh.  I’d prefer what Bjarte Bogsnes said during his keynote about Beyond Budgeting.  A KPI should start from a goal and be revised constantly.  I will experiment with this in detail to figure this out.

    On Thursday evening we had a dinner with strangers. The concept goes as follows:

    • The organization reserved places in several restaurants across Berlin.
    • You sign up for a restaurant and have dinner with people you haven’t met before.

    I went to a Spanish restaurant with 6 other conference attendants and had a great time eating tapas and chatting late in the evening. (watch the sparkle in our eyes!)

    This proved to be a great way to meet new people.  It should be part of every conference!

    Friday started again with some sessions and an open space.  After lunch we listened to some more lighting talks and did a conference retrospective.  Ken Power did a great job facilitating.  I was quite honored that he used one of the exercises of my blog, called retrospective starfish.

    The event was closed by a keynote from Dave Snowden and a thanks to all organizers.

    In the evening I flew home with Yves Hanoulle, who made the trip much more enjoyable by being quite the storyteller.

    I didn’t get to see much of the city, because I didn’t want to miss a second of the conference.  Here’s a picture of ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, the one place I visited in Berlin.

    The ALE conference had a great first edition.  I’m looking forward to next year.  Who knows, maybe it will be held in Brussels!

  • Second and Third Agile Belgium Drinkups

    Following the first Agile Belgium Drinkup in June, we held the second and third in July and August at the Delirium Café in Brussels. Fewer people attended, but insightful and interesting discussions happened anyway. Here’s a quick overview of what happened:

    Second Abdup July 13

    Second Agile Belgium Drinkup gathered 7 people from different horizons. Developers and Coaches. We exchanged some of our concerns and experiences on how to bring Agile practices into the day to day life of a freelance developer. We had an interesting discussion about ways to make a customer understand that he won’t necessarily need everything from it’s backlog to launch a project.

    Alain Ravet suggested to use belgian comics for that purpose. He uses a story from “Le petit Spirou” or “De kleine Robbe” where his mother asks him to choose some teddy bears he could give away to poor children. Of course he says he wants to keep them all, that they are all important to him. His mother then asks him which one he would grab if the house was on fire and he could only take one with him. And she goes on and on, making him imagining all kinds of situations until there are two piles of teddy bears, the ones he really likes and the ones he doesn’t really need. Here’s a picture of it, in french, if anyone has it in dutch, I guess it’s ok to post it in the comments.

    Teddy bear backlog

    If you want to read the full comic, it’s in album 7 Demande à ton père/Vraag dat aan je papa!

    Of course it might be awkward to show that comic strip to customers, but it is a nice starting point if you are looking for inspiration for a small workshop a talk or whatever…

    Third Abdup August 17

    Another holiday Agile Belgium Drinkup, gathering 4 people this time. We forgot to send an email to the mailing list, which didn’t help. But still, again, interesting things happened.

    We raised the tricky question. If you are new in the community or a newly graduated student that would like to apply in a company being Agile, or if you are more experienced and are looking for a job related to Agile, in which company do you actually apply? Should there be someone writing down a list of Agile companies in Belgium? Not really.

    So what can we do then? There was a suggestion from Pascal to add some job board to the actual Agile Belgium blog. Companies that really want to find some Agile aware profiles would pay a fair amount to have their offer published on the Agile Belgium job board. Of course this is just an idea, and we need to know if some companies would be interested, and at what price.

    So, taking actions! Pascal volunteered to write an email explaining the idea. Email that we would send to companies in Belgium that are related to Agile in any ways. We’ll engage in further development if there are companies interested. If you want to help, we are trying to build a long list of companies that are or might be interested in Agile, if you know such companies, drop us an email.

    When is the next Agile Belgium Drinkup?

    The fourth Agile Belgium Drinkup will happen on the 14th of September, still at the Delirium Café at 7 p.m. You can already register here http://abdup.fikket.com/ we hope to see you there.

    See you next time!

  • First Agile Belgium Drinkup

    Last week we had the first Agile Belgium Drinkup. An attempt to gather the belgian Agile community outside of the conferences ecosystem. Last wednesday, from the 17 people that registered online, 12 showed up.

    Thanks to that drinkup, we had the opportunity to discover new faces, people we hadn’t seen before, either at conferences or other user group meetings. It didn’t take so many beers for Xavier to put post-its on the bar and facilitate a small improvised retrospective about this first drinkup.
    Here are the insights and actions we have generated:

    Every participant commits to try bringing someone who wasn’t at the first drinkup

    For those who were there, don’t forget to convince a fellow agilist to come with you next time!

    Merge the belgian community website domains

    It has already been taken care of by Pascal. If you go to http://agilebelgium.org you will be redirected to http://xp.be, which will now be the one and only Agile Belgium community website.

    Write a blogpost about the last drinkup

    I think this is also being covered…

    Find a venue with cheaper beers

    The foodsquare was a nice place but the beers were a little expensive. A venue with cheaper beers and still close to major train stations would be appreciated.

    Keep doing it in Brussels

    Brussels is approximatively 1h or less by train from every major Belgian city, it seems like a good choice for a drinkup.

    Organize next drinkup

    Well, let’s take care of that right now! We decided to do these drinkups every second Wednesday of the month, it means the next one will be on the 13th of July. We will do it in the back room of the Delirium café near the Grand Place. Again, there is a fikket page so that we get an idea of the number of people that might show up:

    http://abdup.fikket.com/

    This is where all the drinkup events will be announced from now on.

    As you can see we didn’t only drink beers. Following everything that emerged from this first edition of the Agile Belgium drinkup we can consider it to be a success. Next time, we hope you’ll join us!

  • ALE 2011 in Berlin, Germany

    The Agile Lean Europe (ALE) network is a pan-European open network for people passionate about Agile and Lean practice and thinking.

    We’re organising the ALE 2011 unconference which will happen from September 7-9 in Berlin.  And we would love you to come!

    Our goal is to create a European melting pot of Agile and Lean practitioners with many diverse perspectives and influences.  It is intended as a cross-border, non-profit collaboration event for mutual learning and continuous improvement. We want you to participate!

    We are reaching out to the European Agile & Lean communities to come and join us during these 3 days of learning and cross-pollination.

    We break the habit!  Diversity is key!

    • We mix a traditional program with open space sessions, lightning talks and keynotes.
    • We invite you to bring your families, there will be a spouse and kids program!
    • We explicitly invite alien speakers who do not work in the software development domain.
    • We want the whole of Europe to join. We already have pre-registrations by people from 28 European countries.

    How can you help?

    Forward this invitation to your community members and ask if they’re interested to submit a talk and register as a participant.

    How does your community benefit from sending representatives to ALE 2011?

    • You get a chance to pick up new ideas which you can spread in your community afterwards.
    • You get to meet a lot of interesting people which you can invite to your community events.
    • Your community gets visibility in the European Agile & Lean network.
    • You get a clearer view on the state of Agile & Lean across Europe.

    You can find more information about ALE 2011 on our website or by following #ale2011 on Twitter.

    In addition to the conference, we’re also starting some ALE Network initiatives.  One is creating a system which allows communities to invite speakers when they happen to visit their region.  You can find out more about other initiatives at the conference or on our ALE Network website.

    We’re counting on you to help Europe take a next step in the world of Agile & Lean!

  • Agile Belgium Drinkup June 2011

    Topic:

    This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

    Add your name to the list to attend.

    Location:

    Foodsquare
    Rue du Marché aux Herbes 120
    1000 Bruxelles

    Between Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

    See you there!

  • Call for Session Proposals – XP Days Benelux

    Mechelen, December 1st – 2nd 2011

    XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

    XP Days Benelux 2011 will have something for everyone. Sessions for people who are new to Agile, sessions for experienced people, a good mix of technical, experience, management and process sessions. We’ll have sessions on Agile in real life, stories of success and horror, hands on workshops, and sessions that will completely surprise you!

    You can be a contributor too

    We’re looking for enthusiastic people who want to lead these sessions. People who work in any role, business or form. People who are willing to share, and are prepared to learn. Reflective practitioners who are not only interested in quality work but also want to know why things work as they do.

    Are you new to presenting? Do you have a nice idea, but you don’t know how to shape it into a session? Don’t worry, we will offer lots of ways to help you:

    • We have coaches who can help you create your session.
    • Through our session proposal system you will get feedback that will help you shape your session
    • We provide opportunities before the conference to try out your session.
    • We have a set of personas to give you some idea of the type of participants you’ll meet at XP Days.

    Have you presented sessions before? The extensive feedback will give you an opportunity to improve your session further. And you can use your experience to help other presenters to improve their session.

    How to propose a session for XP Days

    Becoming an XP Days presenter is simple (but not easy):

    1. Submit a session idea (until July 9th, 2011)
    2. You’ll receive a login to our session improvement tool
    3. You complete your proposal and improve it with the feedback you receive (until August 27th, 2011)
    4. You give feedback on other proposals to help their presenters to create the best proposal they can
    5. Early September, the program committee selects the sessions for the program based on the following criteria:
      • Quality of the session
      • A balance of session subjects and formats
      • Participation of the presenter in the improvement process
      • Votes from everybody who proposed a session

    Important dates

    • Now to July 9th, 2011: submit session proposals
    • Now to August 27th, 2011: improve session proposals
    • September 12th, program committee meeting
    • September 19th, program decided

    Propose a session now to get as much time as possible to get feedback and improve your session.

    See you at the conference!