The Job Hackers Agile Meetup

Discussions of agile practices frequently center around development of software or hardware products whose lifetimes are measured in years or decades. But agile practices also help lead to better outcomes when applied to complex products that exist for only days, weeks, or months: live events. Agile principles — such as building teams around motivated individuals, collaborating closely with customers, keeping feedback loops short, and staying open to changes that increase value for customers — enable event producers to cope with the numerous challenges involved with live events.

In this session, Elizabeth Campbell will share some of her insights on how event planning and management can benefit from Agile practices. She'll discuss examples of how these practices have helped her produce outstanding events as part of both small and larger teams.

Each week of the quarterly Agile MBA course, we hold a Friday Discussion Session in which we share additional relevant content, reinforce our Scrum knowledge with practice test questions, and test our understanding of agile principles by discussing the issues of a real-world scenario in small groups that are moderated by graduates of the Agile MBA course.

If you've taken the Agile MBA course, please take advantage of this opportunity to develop your facilitation skills by volunteering to moderate a small group as it works through the case scenario. You don't need to be a subject matter expert; all you need to do is get a conversation started, guide the flow of the discussion, and help your group reach consensus on a few observations and recommendations.

This quarter, we'll be offering a free 1-hour training session on facilitation skills, to help you become better prepared to moderate a small group. We'll review some basics about facilitiation, then break into small groups and practice facilitation in a realistic scenario.

PREREQUISITES:
To participate in this session, you must first:

• Have already completed our Job Hackers Agile MBA course
• Read our Guidelines for Moderators document (https://thejobhackers.slack.com/archives/C018X4MMNMN/p1616736585032300)

If you have questions, you can post them in the comments below, or reach out to Jim Schibler or Edward Gordon via Slack.

Session Overview:

Almost all of us have teams we want to work better: better productivity, effectiveness, clarity, quality, and frankly joy. There's no silver bullet, but Ron Lichty wrote the book on the role of managers in empowering and encouraging and evangelizing self-organizing teams.

Self-organization shows up in the Agile Manifesto: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” But what is self-organization?

Ron will share metaphors he’s found resonate with teams he’s led and coached and trained - metaphors you can use to help managers and team members alike understand their role in making for joyful self-organizing teamwork - what Christopher Avery refers to when he says that Teamwork Is an Individual Skill (the title of Avery's book).

Ron will explain what managers can do to enable and encourage self-organization, discuss the internal work they need to do on themselves to let go of the urge for control, and outline the work they can do to evangelize and support their teams in the larger organization. He'll also share how individual contributors can diplomatically encourage their managers to foster cultures of joyful self-organizing teamwork.