Designing the Agile Company

Objective
Increase our understanding of how Agile can be used outside the software development context by envisaging what a Agile company would look like.

A secondary objective is to further explore the use of Dialgoue sheets as a learning tool in the community.

Format
Workshop using Dialogue sheets, 90 minutes

Description
Participants will be divided into groups of 3-6 people.  Each group will be given a  short description of a business (e.g. package holiday operator, real estate agent, high street clothes retailer) and large (A1) dialogue sheet.  The teams will asked to imagine themselves as the leaders of the Agile Company described.  Using the Dialogue sheet they will be asked to document the practices and process used by their company to be Agile.

The Dialogue sheets produced by the groups may then be displayed as posters for the remainder of the conference to seed wider debate about the topic.

Schedule
15 minute:  Introduction to the topic, dialogue sheet and form groups
45 minutes: Complete dialogue sheet
15 minutes: Groups present findings
15 minutes: Discussion

Presenters
Allan Kelly is the author of Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile. He advises and trains organizations in how to improve their software development activities and the use of Agile methods.

Giovanni Asproni is a practicing Agile developer, former chair of the XP Day conference and chair of the ACCU conference.

Past experience
Dialogue sheets are device invented by Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden for promoting discussion and debate in groups.  The sheet is designed to prompt and direct discussion around a theme while ensuring that all participants have a say.  Allan Kelly with Lise Hvatum successfully used dialogue sheets in an exercise at SPA 2008 entitled "Closing the Knowing Doing Gap".