I remember being in line for lunch and Johanna Rothman was opposite to me telling someone a story of her recently finished session that she thought she completely bombed! Turns out her audience was far too conservative and not ready for her topic, which is odd because Managing Your Project Portfolio is one of the greatest agile portfolio management books in existence!
Anyway, that freaked me out a little as my session was right after lunch, and it was the first global conference I spoke at with more than 2500 attendees. My topic was “How to Get Started with Agile When You Don’t Know Where to Start?”
The premise was, not many, save Diana Larson, Michael Spayd and a few others, were talking about how agile transformation was simply a trigger for organizational change. Most talks at the time were about agile processes, technical practices and agile was largely still viewed as something those IT people do.
My session was about how to de-mystify agile with your organization and how to create your own approach for change by understanding how your organization actually changes. This debuted the ideas from my 2009 blog post, 4 Steps to Agile Transformation, with an overly simplified model: Understand, Educate, Execute, Reflect.
One of the attendees was a publisher from Pearson Education who offered me a book deal as no one, at the time, was talking about agile transformation in an organizational change context.