The Downfall of Agile Hitler (Funny stuff)

The downfall of Agile Hitler video

Enjoy :-)

Cutter Consortium 2010 predictions

The Cutter Consortium just published its 2010 predictions.
http://www.cutter.com/predictions.html
Three of them are related to Agile.

APLN chapters in Latinamerica

Back last June I came up with the idea of staring an APLN chapter in Mexico. After talkng about it with several people in both the USA--at the BayAPLN mainly David Chilcott and Cesar Idrovo--and Mexico (polling people to see how much enthusiasm there is about it) I decided to go for it. Coincidentally an agilist from Costa Rica, David Alfaro, contacted BayAPLN in October and so we held a teleconference USA-Mex-CR (since I was in Mexico on business those days) to brainstorm how to get those chapters started. I suggested David A and I to keep in close contact to share experiences and help each other out in addition to getting coaching from David C and Cesar.

Then in November I had the opportunity to meet a group of Brazilians let by Guilherme Chapiewski, who were in San Francisco for the QCon conference, and invited them to the BayAPLN meeting to be held the following day (talk about good timing). They all attended and loved it. Guilherme told me he would like to get a chapter started in Brazil.

Long story short, David A has been actively increasing awareness on agile in Costa Rica and is working towards getting the first meeting. We learned that a chapter in Brazil was started a while back but didn't succeed and current efforts are towards re-starting it. From my side the first MexAPLN (unofficial for now) took place on Dec 8th in Mexico City and was a great start, with 8 executives from diverse enterprises attending.

Several ideas I have in mind are:

• Leveraging the fact that we have close relationship with BayAPLN (with me now being part of the Coordinating Committee) to figure out ways to help those chapters get up and running.
• Growing the MexAPLN to become the prime chapter in Latinamerica
• Create a latinamerican APLN metachapter to have higher impact in that geographical area and organize world-class events.

Last BayAPLN meeting of 2009

The last BayAPLN meeting, held a the Tacit Knowledge offices, was a retrospective of the year. There were 24 people at the meeting, which is low for BayAPLN meeting standards but understandable given that lots of people are either out of town, shopping, or wrapping things up at work to finish the year in balance.

What was done and accomplished throughout the year was quite impressive, for example:

• 329 registrations at the yahoo group
• 394 registrations at the linkedIn group
• Average attendance per meeting was 44, and topped around 70.
• We had a pretty good number of Agile-Lean celebrities giving presentations at meetings on topics related to agile and: current economy, adoption patterns, group coherence, learning games, agile transition styles, scaling scrum, Personas and story maps.
• Co-sponsored the Agile Open California 2009 open space.

We also noted areas of improvement and action items for next year, such as:

• Better task distribution
• Make presentations more easily available on our website
• Increase knowledge, e.g., adding terms on Wikipedia
• Give support to new APLN chapters such as those in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil
• etc

We all look forward to an even better 2010. First meeting is Jan 19 and the activity is Chartering.