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October 9, 2017

ASAS2017 in hindsight

ASAS2017 in hindsight

A couple of days ago, Thursday October 5th to be exact, I attended ASAS2017. It was my fifth attendance of the Agile Software Architecture Symposium.

Summarising

This year, as part of keeping a promise, I did a presentation at ASAS 2017 about Agile and Architecting. Adapting the presentation up to the last minute based on feedback I garnered while attending other presentations, I felt really agile.
One of the key take aways for me was that doing a Kahoot! to know the audience instead of raising hands makes a lot of sense when you want to know who your audience was. But you need to keep those stats. And it's almost imperative to have a clear means of being contacted shown on a slide. At the end.

A couple of days ago, Thursday October 5th to be exact, I attended ASAS2017. It was my fifth attendance of the Agile Software Architecture Symposium. This time around I was one of the speakers. It was a promise I made last year to the organizers. The promise was that if 2017 would have an ASAS, I would submit a proposal for a talk and if it would happen as such, I would be one of the speakers at ASAS 2017. Promises are there to keep, so I kept my promise.

Funny part, although at the time I really didn't think it funny, is that just days before my family and I would drive to Croatia for our summer vacation I checked when in November ASAS would be this year. Yup, I was mistaken by a month and the date was instead of somewhere in November, some time early October. The 5th to be exact. And apart from my submission in early April this year, I had nothing prepared at that time.

The topic of my talk would be something about architects being able to survive in an agile world. Something I am talking about almost on a daily basis with clients and especially their architects and agile coaches. But since April I had changed my story continuously... based on the feedback I got during those discussions. Understanding what works and what doesn't is important and crucial when you're coaching. So it was more or less imperative that the contents of the talk would be significantly different when compared to my initial view on the matter in March and the presentation I would give on the 5th of October.
Just to give you a hint, this is what I proposed in April:

How architects can be successfully agile.

Summary: Architects are known for their talent to ensure that projects run out of budget or out of time. The best of architects are successful in ensuring that projects run out of both time and budget. But with the advent of agile practices and the agile manifest, architects are no longer needed, they have no longer a role in continuously postponing a project and ensuring that tons of money are wasted. With waterfall becoming water under the bridge, there is no longer a need for procrastination by the architect. Unfortunately, as evolution goes, architects are genetically inspired to build ivory towers. Doomed to follow the path of the dinosaur. Unless... unless they manage to become agile. This session is about how architects can become agile and thrive again, gaining the respect of... well pretty much everybody and their mother.

When I set off on this journey, I figured I would talk about architects and how they need to change their attitude and way of working. But over the course of the months since April I realized more and more that it's not the architect that needs to change, so I adapted and changed my presentation.
In fact I changed my presentation even 10 minutes before I had to go on stage and give it. Truth be said that in those final minutes the changes weren't significant, yet they were adaptations to feedback I got while attending other presentations that day.

I started of with a Kahoot! to get to know my audience. Instant feedback in terms of laughs meant to me that it was a good way to break the ice... but since I forgot to save the results and in the first place to test the quiz myself, meant that I don't have the right metrics to judge the appropriateness of my slides.

I ended with the opportunity for my audience to ask questions. And that was when the room stayed quiet. Silence. No questions. Not a captivating story that was raising questions. Until a question was asked. By one of the Arc-E-Tect blog followers. There was the answer, and that's when the questions came. And people stayed afterwards, wanting to know more. And then there was the after-party and more people wanted to discuss the presentation.

So in hindsight, the presentation went well. It went well considering the metrics I had set for myself up front. How many people would be in the room, how many would leave during the presentation, how many would join the Kahoot and how many questions would be asked during the presentation. And finally how many would want to talk about the topic after the presentation was done and they had ample opportunity to talk about other things to other people. In all cases it was beyond expectations.
Considering my expectations; the Kahoot! was about getting around 75% of the audience to join, which I think was achieved. I don't have numbers about the audience. Considering people leaving the room during the presentation, I only saw 2 persons leave in a room of about 50 people. Considering questions asked, 3 questions was for me the minimum, based on the fact that I thought I would have time to spare for questions and the story was compelling. 4 questions were asked with 4 different persons asking more questions.

All in all I feel that my presentation at ASAS 2017 was a success, also as an experiment to see if you can consider a presentation to be a product that adds value and can be done in an agile way. 

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Arc-E-Tect

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