The BCS CMSG event on 12th October on “SCM Agile vs. Traditional” that I organised went very well. There was a nice group of presentations and they seemed to mesh well and got very good feedback from the attendees. I look forward to a good set of talks at our conference next year as I think there is plenty of information to mine in this area.
A good proportion of the delegates (maybe 30-40%) had agile projects on the go already. A similar number thought they would soon have agile projects on the go, so it was good to see we had the right sort of people there. The Q&A session with the panel of speakers was interesting. A few people remarked that agile seeming like a fad. Also comments were passed on whether the government would ever consider more agile procurement instead of the current monolithic requirements exercises which end up with massive systems and often massive failures.
I took on a little too much myself in both organising the event, getting speakers set and writing a presentation myself, although Brad provided some excellent input, and indeed the basis for many of the slides via email. The presentation was fine, though I felt I needed to streamline it even more – still too much stuff!
As it happens, I presented pretty much the same thing at the Perforce User Group meeting near Cambridge on the Thursday and it went a bit better second time round. I was a little surprised that fewer people proportionally were doing anything agile like.