When agile makes sense and when it doesn’t?
When Agile makes sense and when it doesn’t? — the ucreate team decided to check it out at the event organised by the Polish Tech Link UK/PL at the Walkie Talkie Building last Monday.
Polish Tech Link UK/PL is a meetup group designed to to integrate the Polish tech & startup community in the UK as well as to foster mutual business relations between British and Polish technology sectors.
Guest speakers:
Kamila Piorowska, the Independent Agile Coach, (investment banking)
James Routledge, Consultant, Leancup
Jerzy Wąchała, General Manager, SMT Software
Nigel Allgood, Agile Coach, Royal Bank of Scotland
The event kicked off with a discussion on the topic: When and when not to use Agile? Four knowledgeable speakers that have experience in Agile project management in different environments attended the panel. The invited guests work with a range of clients, from early stage startups to large multinational corporates. They talked about Agile history, the core values and the Agile Manifesto.They tried to explain the differences in Waterfall and Agile approaches, the Scrum framework, and shared interesting opinions on the hybrid approach, and the notion of success and failure. They also introduced and described the role of the Agile coach.
A mixed crowd of Agile enthusiasts and people completely new to this methodology attended the event. The young entrepreneurs and startup founders as well as the experienced corporate businessmen, people working in leading Polish and British tech companies, programmers, project managers and VCs, had their chance to ask a range of questions on Agile methodology.
The second part of the event was led in a form of an Open Space Conference. The attendees suggested the areas of Agile methodology that they want to explore: i.e. ‘’Scaling Agile’’, ‘’Agile beyond IT’’, ‘’Agile delivery of the product vs. project management’’, ‘’Agile in extremely small and/or distributed teams’’, ‘’Agile with 3rd party suppliers & outsourcing’’. The topics were discussed in small workshop groups, and afterwards the results of the discussions were presented to the whole audience.
We found the event quite educational, well-organised and perfectly conducted. Held on the 31st floor in the DWF offices, with the stunning view of the beautiful London skyline, it was a perfect opportunity to network and we enjoyed to be a part of it.
