Leading Answers is a proud sponsor of Agile Coach Camp - West 2015, an Open Space Conference to be held in Calgary, Alberta on the weekend of June 12-14, 2015. I would like to invite my fellow agile practitioners to attend!

Agile Coach Camp – An Unconference

Let’s have a conversation about what it means to be an agile coach, why it matters, and where we are headed. The annual gathering at Agile Coach Camp creates opportunities for our coaching community to share our successes, our learning, our questions and our unresolved dilemmas – all in an energizing and supportive environment.

The Open Space Technology, “Unconference” format, encourages participants to join the conversation.

Each of us can make a contribution to the art and science of helping people and teams be their best as they deliver valuable software. Share your stories, observations, and enquiries. Discuss coaching challenges you have overcome or those you are still wrestling with today. Describe opportunities you see emerging as we seek to improve the organization of knowledge work. Bring your questions. Test your ideas. Listen and learn from others.

The fee to attend this unconference is $75 per person and includes all food & drink for Friday evening, Saturday (breakfast, lunch & snacks) and Sunday morning.

The Open Spaces Technology wikipedia page does an excellent job of explaining how this unconference works - we recommend taking a look.

For more information, or to register, visit the Agile Coach Camp Canada West website

Thank you

Mike Griffiths

Leading Answers

ACCC West Sponsor

Knowledge transfer and sharing on agile teams differs from traditional approaches in both form and the internal vs external focus. Agile teams produce few of the traditional knowledge transfer documents yet their daily practices focus on knowledge transfer. While agile teams spend much of their time transferring information internally they share little with external groups other than the evolving product or service they create. These differences lead to some polarizing views of knowledge sharing and transfer on agile projects.

Some people see agile projects as knowledge transfer deserts where information is hoarded by key individuals and no useful documentation produced. Others believe agile projects are all about knowledge transfer.  So why the disagreement, how can smart, experienced people have such different views about the same topic? It comes down to what we consider knowledge transfer and sharing to be.

A requirements specification document should be a great vehicle for sharing knowledge and transferring it from analysts to developers. It is a permanent record of requirements that can be read by many people and referred back to when needed. If questions or the need for clarifications arise – go look in the requirements specification. This works well for stable, unchanging requirements that can be gathered comprehensively up front.

Baselined plans are great knowledge sharing tools too. They lay out what should happen, when and by whom and paint a clear picture for all to see. Plans illuminate the path forward and communicate this to all involved stakeholders. Lessons Learned documents gathered at the end of a project are classic knowledge transfer and sharing tools also. Recording what went well, what did not go well and recommendations for similar projects to follow seems the epitome of knowledge transfer.

Agile projects down play the value of upfront plans, avoid detailed requirement specifications declaring them unreliable and wasteful. They often spurn Lessons Learned documents too, instead performing retrospectives amongst themselves. It is no wonder then, that to some people agile projects appear to lack the basics of knowledge sharing and transfer. However these people are measuring with the wrong yardstick, or fishing with the wrong size net and missing the knowledge rich plankton that feeds agile teams. When you “see the matrix” of agile projects you immediately realize the whole process is about knowledge transfer.