Bob's Blog
Bob is a prolific blogger who simply enjoys sharing his experiences with colleagues in the Agile Community. Topics revolve around Scrum, XP, Kanban, Project Management, Business Analysis, Testing, Leadership and General Musings.
Check back often as we've always got something to say...
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Travels
I was reviewing LinkedIn one morning, as I often do, and I noticed a note from Myles Hopkins of Be Agile that he and his firm were celebrating 20 years of service. First, congratulations Myles! But second, it made me think about the longevity of my own firm—RGalen Consulting Group. And it hit me!
In August 2021, I’m going to be celebrating 20-years of consulting service to my clients. Holy Cow!
I thought I’d share a timeline of sorts…
It dawned on me the other day. I client asked for role-based guidance around ScrumMasters and Product Owners. One of my pointers was to the Meta-cast podcast that Josh Anderson and I do together.
But there are 100+ and counting podcasts there and I realized that it's very hard to cull through them all to get role-specific advice.
So I thought I'd pull together three lists in this post that align with the three Scrum roles: ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team. It's not intended to be exhaustive, but I think you'll find value in the discussions.
If you know me at all, you know that I speak at approximately 15-20 events per year. Sometimes, at small local conferences. Other times, at larger national conferences. And still at other times, I'm lucky enough to be invited to international events.
The reason I do it is much less about marketing or exposure, and much more about sharing my ideas in what I view as the "agile community". Even though I'm a strong introvert, I enjoy getting out there and meeting people. Getting the opportunity to share, debate, network, argue, and simply chat about all things agile (and occasionally other topics ;-)
Every year I try to spend time on my own training. I usually start thinking about two things the year before:
Then I review the available courses and I’ll try to come up with 2-3 things that I’ll focus on for improvement.
This year, I’ve planned on the following:
Last week I attended the Agiles Conference in Medellin Colombia. Velocity Partner’s latest office is also in Medellin, so I had the chance to hang out with some colleagues as well.
First let me tell you that this was my first trip to Medellin and Colombia. So I didn’t know what to expect. I was surprised at the altitude, the lush greenery, the cosmopolitan nature of the city, and most pleasantly surprised by the people. They were warm, fun, bright, welcoming, energetic, and engaging.
I’ve just returned from my first trip to China. I attended the TiD 2014 Conference, which was a consolidation of 3 specific conferences:
It’s the first year for the conference’s to be united in this way. For example, this was the first year for AgileChina, but the third or fourth year for ChinaTest.
The Agile Austin conference was held on March 21 in Austin Texas. It's been held since 2012, so this was the third annual conference.
I'd submitted a couple of talks and was lucky enough to be selected to present. Most of the presenters were from the local area and Texas, but a few "out of town" folks participated. Since this was my first Agile Austin conference, I didn't really know what to expect.
Well, it was a blast. 500 raging agilistas showed up. They apparently sold out the event with about 100 on the waiting list. Imagine that? I was talking to one of the organizers and he said people in his company were asking him to "get them in" and he had to turn them down.
