Once again you have the opportunity to attend the workshop, "Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" in Portland, Oregon, December 5-7. For more about the workshop and a downloadable registration form, please look in the Events section of this blog. (See that sidebar over there?)
This will be the fourth time Esther and I have presented the workshop as an open-to-the-public event. It's a workshop for anyone who leads Agile teams--anytime. We work from the central premise that highly performing, agile, and/or self-organizing teams thrive on leadership that emerges on demand, which includes informal and formal leadership roles. So the participants who come to the workshop include team members, team coaches, engineering leads, Scrum masters, project managers, product managers, VP's of development, and others.
Since we first proposed "Secrets" more than 2 years ago, we've been asked to bring the workshop in-house more and more often. We have presented it many more times to intact teams than as a public course. I like working with on-going working groups. I like learning their local organizational language--every company has one--and applying it in the workshop. The on-site workshop participants walk away from the workshop with agreements about how they'll work together, and each person has a cohort of colleagues to turn to for reinforcement and support as they try out behaviors and concepts from the course. We get great feedback about the positive difference this workshop makes when everyone takes it together.
Still, I have a special attachment to the public version for a number of reasons. We limit attendance to no more than three participants from the same organization, so each workshop group forms its own culture. It's such fun for me to watch that culture emerge as the group gels over three days and two nights. The Kennedy School setting is great. Who can resist the combination of elementary school and brew pub? Not to mention the legendary 'tater tots and apple cider! Not us!
As a residential workshop, we also can hold illuminating evening sessions. I won't speak for Esther, but I know those sessions often illuminate me as well as the participants.
I'm looking forward to whatever new surprises this next edition of the public workshop has in store. :-)
Again, for a fuller description of course topics and a registration form, click on the link in Events to the right. Hope you can join us too!