Who comes to LAST Conference?

By Ed Wong

Who comes to LAST_preview

I run an event with Craig Brown called LAST Conference. It’s happening for the 4th time on 18 September 2015. In 2014, I was pleasantly surprised that the Software Development Today blog rated us #20 in the Top 50 agile conferences.

It’s a meetup on steroids

Of the various descriptions there are about the event, I like “It’s a meetup on steroids”, the best. It’s designed for people who have a bit of experience with agile (I run an event called 1st Conf for people who have less experience). We have a whole day of workshops, talks, lightning talks, retrospectives etc. We deliberately have up to 7 concurrent sessions, to keep things exciting and we keep it really affordable, too.

Who comes?

In the lead up to this year’s event, I was doing some analysis of who comes along so I thought I’d share. Look ma, I did a pie chart! Click the preview above for a larger version.

Not unsurprisingly, people who fit into a manager role, make up the greatest proportion of participants, followed closely by Business Analysts. The types of job title that made it into the Manager bucket were “Business Solutions Manager” or “Practice Manager”.

It’s good to see that there is a reasonably diverse spread of roles and it’s really good to see that Developers are about one fifth of the cohort, there’s a few Architects and a good few QA people. I would like more UX folk to come along…we’ve got a couple of UX sessions in the pipeline this year.

18 September 2015

We’ve run the event in the darkest days of Melbourne Winter, up until now. This year, we’re going to be in Spring! In order to make use of Swinburne Uni’s brand-new Advanced Manufacturing Design Centre (AMDC), we have moved away from their crowded winter term and instead will be on 18 September 2015. We will be opening registration in the coming days (signup to the mailing list to be the first to know), and you can still submit a session idea, over on the LAST Conference website.

Headline sponsors – elabor8

Sponsorship from companies keeps the event affordable. elabor8 have returned as headline sponsors this year. If you’d like to join them, then please get in touch.

LAST Conference is organised by Tabar, a group of agile exponents in Melbourne, Australia.

June 10th, 2015
Category: LAST, Tabar
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The story behind Guerrilla Training

By Ed Wong

I recently announced a new agile and lean training concept that I am calling Guerrilla Training. Here’s why I’ve called it that, and a bit more on the thinking behind it.

Unconventional, yet highly effective

Guerrilla (noun)

a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces…

referring to actions or activities performed in an impromptu way, often without authorization…

Guerrrila coffee

When I started thinking about setting up a series of training days that do things differently, my naming options were either Café Training, or Guerrilla Training. In the end, I went for Guerrilla, because the venues don’t necessarily have to be cafés, the definition of guerrilla, and also because I liked the gorilla/guerrilla pun.

To me being agile and lean is about being adaptable; trying different ways to do things better. My thinking is that agile and lean training should be different and better too.

The idea is to be effective, professional and focused, giving a platform for some of the best agile and lean practitioners in Melbourne to share their knowledge authentically.

Similar to Guerrilla Diplomacy, a guerrilla training aesthetic “places maximum value on innovation and on creating and sustaining an atmosphere of confidence, trust and respect.”

Start as you mean to go on

We’ve gotten off to a pretty good start, with Neil Killick and Craig Brown running the first Guerrilla Training session on Lean and Agile Project Management using Scrum, just yesterday. A Net Promoter Score of 57 is a great start, as is a comment like:

after yesterday, I now have a renewed sense of purpose for my particular Agile mission.

There’s more coming, so if you want to know more, go and read the Guerrilla Style Training page, and…

sign up for updates

Why the gorilla?

Gorilla GuerrillaOne of my favourite ever projects was in a team being intrapreneurial (the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization) within a rather large FT100 listed company. We had a lot of autonomy and purpose; far more than I had experienced before, and it was great.

At the beginning we bootstrapped like crazy, designing a logo ourselves, using MS Paint. Later when it became time to think more about branding our product, we discovered that we had a pretty close connection to Jon Hicks, a pretty prominent visual designer. He had worked at our company before furthering his career as a freelancer. Jon’s wife still worked there, so we casually asked whether he was busy at the moment. To my surprise and delight, he was willing and able to do some work for us.

Jon’s written a book about icon design, re-designed the Skype emoticons, designed the Mailchimp and Shopify logos, and is well known for working on the Firefox logo. Getting “the Firefox guy” to do a logo for one of my products remains a highlight of my career 🙂

He also did the gorilla logo for Clear Left’s “guerrilla user testing” app, Silverback, that you can see above. That’s why I did a little drawing of a gorilla and the cup of coffee.

August 31st, 2013
Category: Tabar, Training
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Net Promoter score

By Ed Wong

I was thinking about Net Promoter scores today because of Bernd’s video from LAST Conference about the Net Promoter System for Agile Companies (link below), the NPS data we collected from LAST Conference, and also because the training session that Neil and Craig’s ran yesterday got a pleasing NPS. I was glad to hear this news, because it was the first training day in my new Guerrilla Training series.

What is Net Promoter®?

To recap, NPS is a method for gauging peoples’ satisfaction with a product, service, activity etc. You ask people the question, “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues?” Most commonly asking for a number between 0 and 10, with 0 being not likely at all, and 10 being definitely. Those that respond with 9 or 10, are Promoters, those who respond with 6 or lower are Detractors.

The score is worked out by subtracting the % of Detractors from the % of Promoters, to give a number between -100 (everyone is a Detractor) to +100 (everyone is a Promoter). A score of +50 or above is considered to be pretty good, according to the Wiki that knows.

You would commonly ask a second, open ended question asking why people gave their score, so that you can identify what you’ve done well and what can be targeted for improvement.

An example that I’m proud of, can be seen in the embedded tweet at the top of this post. It’s one of the responses from a Product Inception workshop that I co-facilitated with Cheryl, a couple of months ago. I was pretty happy with an overall Net Promoter score of 76.9!

I think Net Promoter is generally a pretty useful tool to use on a variety of things. What do you think?

Further reading/watching

Net Promoter on Wikipedia

Video of Bernd’s Net Promoter System for Agile Companies talk at LAST Conference.

Official Net Promoter website.

August 31st, 2013
Category: Being agile, Friends and allies, LAST, Tabar, Training
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