Pollyanna Pixton tells us that within a culture of trust leaders must stand back and if they don't then they are hampering and restricting the productivity and the creativity and the innovation of teams. She discusses how leaders can foster a culture of trust and what they must do to get the most out of Agile teams.
One area of the Agile ecosystem that is gaining traction these days is Agile user groups. This year, established groups are growing, and new groups are forming. Established groups are taking shots at larger conference-style events. The Scrum Alliance has a new user-group community liaison. It appears that user groups are starting to play in influential role in the worldwide Agile community.
The second annual State of Agile Development Survey, sponsored by the Agile Project Leadership Network and VersionOne has been released. The survey is described as taking "5-7 minutes to complete approximately 20 questions". The results are completely anonymous, and will be presented at Agile 2007. Three Amazon gift certificates will be randomly drawn for participants.
The Agile Project Leadership Network, unlike the Agile Alliance, has decided to wade into the certification waters. The APLN has decided to take input from the community as it embarks on defining two different levels of Agile Leadership certification.
The Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) held their first Leadership Summit in parallel to this week's Agile2006 conference. The day ended with Jim Highsmith receiving the "Superhero of Agile Process" award, as a thank-you for two years of leadership in creating and developing the APLN. Agile2006 chairperson Todd Little steps up to the challenge. Update: view the list of 2007 board members.
During QCon San Francisco 2008, InfoQ and BayAPLN, a local group of Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), organized a panel comprised of Agile experts which answered questions from the audience. The panelists were: David Chilcott, Moderator, Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney, Pat Reed.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
Tim Lister explains the principles of Agile Project Leadership in the framework of the Declaration of Interdependence.
At Agile2006 InfoQ interviewed Alistair Cockburn, methodology creator, author and long-time leader in the Agile community. Topics discussed ranged from the history of the Agile movement to the future of methodologies, with a look at User Stories and Use Cases along the way. This interview uncovers how his research for IBM may have sparked the creation of the Agile Manifesto.
