Wednesday 14 March 2007

QCon - Day 1 - Diana Larsen - Agile Team Building

Diana is a thought leader in the Agile World, and the author of Agile Retrospectives, a key book for guiding a project manager, team leader through the retrospective process.

The tutorial was attended my many people in the same situation as me, project managers/technical architect/team leaders/developers. Diana has an incredible aura about her, and the discussions she incited between us reminded me of that great buzz when working together as a team, and that people are absolutely key to developing good software.

The session focused on Facilitative Management (as opposed to controlling management), leadership as a role (rather than a job) and the activities of a good facilitative leader, being aware of where a team is in its "Orming" cycle, appreciating the bookends of a project (kick off meetings, retrospectives). Big parts of the session involved us sharing our experiences of where meetings/team working/team building really worked, and more importantly why they worked.

All in all an inspiration start to what is chocking up to be an inspirational conference.

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