Thoughts on AgileTour Toronto 2012

AgileTour Toronto is a highly recommended annual, one-day Agile conference in our region.  It is a great, low-cost opportunity to learn, meet experts, and share experiences with hundreds of practitioners from the Greater Toronto Area and Southern Ontario.  The conference usually has a well balanced program that has something for everyone, regardless of their functional role.  The 2012 edition of this conference, taking place will not be an exception.

Warning: the tickets to this conference went on sale this week!  Last year, they sold out in less than one full week; this year, the venue is bigger, so it may take the organizers a bit longer to sell them out.  Don't procrastinate.

Now I would like to highlight several sessions in the conference program that might be of interest to our group.  In the participant survey during the September meeting (thank you everyone who attended and filled it out), many people asked for some introductory and how-to content related to Lean and Kanban.  As one of the organizers, I assure you that we will be offering such content in the upcoming meetings of the Limited WIP Society.  But in the meantime, there is this great local conference where you might get some useful ideas sooner.

Here is the link to the conference program.  The session descriptions are not finalized yet (as one of the speakers, I know that the deadline to jazz them up is October 16th), however, you can get a pretty good idea of what most sessions will be about.

Manvir Singh Grewal and Brandon Byars will speak about the Lean Data Architecture.  Their experience report from applying Lean thinking to data warehousing and mapping the value stream of business intelligence sounds fascinating.  Mike Edwards will "ask", The Lean PMO: Oxymoron or Possible?  I suppose his answer is possible and he will show how we can rethink the concept of PMO so that it can create value in an Agile organization.  Jeff Anderson will present Lean Change: Enabling Agile Transformation through Lean Startup, Kanban, and Kotter, repeating his September presentation to our group, in case you missed it.

Yours truly will be Unveiling Kanban - it's a gamified, illustrated introduction to the Kanban method.  I am also teaming up with Gerry Kirk to introduce you to Personal Kanban.  Our joint session is titled Lean Coffee or an Introduction to Personal Kanban.  And last, but not least, if you want to get a taste of Seattle-style Lean Coffee, we'll do our best to organize one at this conference - arrive one hour before the official start and join one of us in the breakfast room.