With a glass of St. Martin’s wine in hand I have pleasure to invite you to Agilia Conference / Agile Management Congress – a leading Central European conference on agile methods. And let me share with you, what we have prepared for upcoming event. This time again to Olomouc, following your excellent feedback on the venue and location.
In 2017, the main topic is Building Agile Organization. We plan to discuss extensively, what changes it requires to implement agility into organization and what are experiences with it. Be it a small or large victories in implementing methodology, saving projects from disasters, reengineering of company structure or improved motivation of the people. It can also be surprising discoveries, when things did not went as smoothly as expected or failed completely. Or adoption of different plans as a consequence of surprising learnings about customers, about market, about our own people etc.
Our traditions get minor improvement. We will still insist on fresh content from world best leaders, authors, and also from practitioners. We will continue in our screening process, which is becoming legendary. Speakers are still screened by our staff to make sure, they are experts on given field. Case studies are still verified on site to prevent fakes or politically motivated propaganda. In addition to this, we are introducing unofficial track. We face enormous growth of offers for presentations from remote places, North America, Asia and Australia in particular. And currently it is beyond our capabilities and resources to verify on site these proposals. Our label unofficial track represents cases, which we believe are interesting and inspirational, sounds realistic, however they couldn’t be verified.
Why to come in 2017?
Networking – most valuable at the conference is meeting new people and enhancing personal networks. We will increase of number of networking opportunities. There will be Ice Breaking Party, more playful and fun as you always wanted to have it. We continue with Great Networking Evening to expand your contacts, discuss and relax. The conference layout and program will be reorganized the way to improve networking for people with interest in particular domain. And we work on toys, that will make this networking more fun and more engaging.
Biggest change will be internationalization. We are working on improving international diversity and attracting more delegates from abroad. As Agile is not adopted the same way in every country – Scandinavian countries have great deal of experience, Balkan countries are just starting and all others are somewhere in between – we want to provide range of experience and enable cross cultural learning.
Business Tour – is a new form of networking. We are bringing Brno and Ostrava to the table to give delegates business connections in these cities. How does it work? Just book for a day trip to visit tech companies, technology incubators including light sightseeing. Learn on the spot, what does it mean to live and work in these towns, how companies looks like from inside, meet their people and managers. Find out your new business partner, or customers, or simply a place to be, if you think about career enhancement.
Balanced content diversity – in the past years we focused our effort to make event attractive for decision makers. It is essential, because if we want to implement so radical change as Agile into organization in sustainable manner, then it must be secured by senior management. It has not been an easy task, because Agile is labeled as something for IT and sw developers only – no matter such perception is totally wrong. We believe, Agile should embrace all parts of the organization and we try to prepare program attractive for all areas – development, management, finance, HR, product & business or technical support. To make it more visible, we plan to include dedicated technical track, where we wants to speak more about development practices, tools, testing, TDD, XP, CI&CD and many more.
Novel presentations – We will continue giving priority to novel presentations, which are written exclusively for Agilia Conference and which were not presented yet at any other event.
Minimal Dress Code – do not be afraid. No ties will be required. As Agilia Conference/AMC becomes leading European event, more international visitors are expected. An event is also representation of our country, of our culture and values in front of the world. Agilia is not hippie’s event. And we do not want to offend delegates with inappropriate dress for the event. Homeless and beach style are not suitable for the event. We suggest casual or business casual.
Agile Management Congress (AMC) – will be arranged again as separated track, and again with very intensive program. It aims at senior managers across the organizations and board including HR, Finance, Operations and Sales. It will discuss topics as organizational structure, beyond budgeting, remunerations, motivation and many more.
Presentations and workshops – we have record in number of continents represented by our speakers. Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. However, there will be slight change here, too. Practically all most known personalities, who were with foundations of Agile movement, writers of most known books, or founders of frameworks, were already speaking at Agilia. And in spite of some of them are coming back again, we want to go different direction. There are many more Agilists, who are very well recognized for their work, have proven results, and are not yet famous globally – rising stars. And I have pleasure to invite you to meet some of them:
- Dominik Maximini – author of The Scrum Culture, dedicates to aspect of agility as organizational culture,
- Cesario Ramos – transformation consultant, will speak about organizational design for various parameters of agility,
- Kathy Berkidge – addresses soft aspect of agile mindset – Mindfulness,
- Kálmán Kémenczy – is product manager, who share his experience with agile introduction in product office
- Utpal Chakraborty – part time movie maker, who uses lean and agile approaches to improve business performance of movie making process,
and many more great presentations and workshops to come, just follow conference website.
You can still influence the event. Let us know your expectations, and we will try to include into program whenever possible.
Tickets are now available!
Limited number of Pre-Early Bird tickets is available. So hurry up to make your reservation in time!
About author: Michal Vallo helps managers to understand agile techniques, benefit from its adoption to their organizations and consequently radically improve organizational overall performance. He is principal, agile trainer, coach and manager at Aguarra, founding member of Agilia community and organizer of Agilia Conference / Agile Management Congress in Olomouc, Agilia Budapest Conference and Agilia Prague conference.