I attended Agile09 confernece in Copenhagen, where I met great thinkers and a lot of nice people.

Tom Gilb is my hero. I was told by Craig Larman that he was the FIRST agile methodologist who had articulated "Evo" with a PDSA feedback cycle in the late 70's. I long wanted to meet him in person. And finally I met him and found he was a passionate gentleman with deep thoughts.

Kai Gilb extends "Evo" to more business directions to include stakeholders and their value in the loop. He says that Agile is too a narrow developer-centric view of the world. There is a much bigger world in the business side, which is, in Scrum, addressed as just one ringable neck(Product Owner). It is vital to focus on "value" not "feature" and feedback in the measurement of the value, not just working software. I agree!

Roger Leaton from BT shared his experience in rolling out Agile in a large company. He made 70% of the project be Agile, which was 30% in 2003. He sees Agile transition as a cultural change, and I share a lot in common with him. The slide on the left is showing the difficulty of cultural changes as a iceberg. Even though the surface of it looks to be changed(adoption of practices), if the hidden part(understanding of value, culture of the organization) is not, the change won't last.

Staffan Nöteberg is the author of "Pomodoro technique illustrated". he expained the technique in a unique style using puppet plays and hand-written illustrations. I'm thinking of emulating him sometime.

I met Nicolai Dragsted from a lawfirm. He is a lawyer trying to create a type of contracts suitable for publich sectors to outsource Agile development. His material includes concepts of waterfall and Agile, issues to be addressed in the contracts, and templates of the contracts. I will take this back to Japan and introduce it to Japan government.

OK, me. I talked "Learning Kaizen from TOYOTA". I showed the audience a video and together with them extracted lean ideas and commonalities with Agile in it. I recently read John Shook's(The first American manager at TOYOTA who transported TPS concepts to NUMMI) article on Starbucks Lean adoption, and am really convinced. So added "Lean is scientific management where the scientists are the fron line workers" as a message.

(thanks for the picture, Troels Hansen)

Here's the mind map.

I have a lot other topics to say, but I should go sleep now to get out of the jetlag. Thank you Dan and Anja from DANSK IT and Bent, Sune, Jesper, Thomas and other BestBrains wild guys. They organize a study tour to Japan every year called "roots of lean", so Norse who want to visit Japan, contact them!