Captain's Log | Monday, April 19, 2010

Agile Stories Series

When I started out with AGILEMinds, the whole idea behind it was that it should be something for and by the community. For the community is the 'easy' part. I started out with focusing on events and trainings right from the industry experts offering the agile enthusiasts a better platform to hear and learn about agile. A way better alternative than all those big consultancy companies offering less than basic training from consultants who hardly read 4 blog posts about the topic... I had to start somewhere :-)

What's up next?

Since mankind stories have played an important role in knowledge sharing. Stories endure, connect but most importantly stories get passed along from person to person from generation to generation. One thing I notice while organizing these events is that it is VERY hard to get companies - not consultancy companies but end clients - to share their stories. So starting from know I'm going to pro-actively go out there and search for companies that are willing to share their Agile roadmap up until this point, their pain, their joys, what's up ahead....

Stories are important because it gives people and companies the feeling that they are not alone out there...

These stories will be part of the AGILEMinds community site which I hope to launch asap :-)

Interested in sharing?
Let's get in touch!

Also, should you have a good name for this series let me know!


Training | Business Model Innovation

Our Business Model Innovation workshop with Alexander Osterwalder just got more excited. I got in touch with Karen Boers from IBBT which is a government supported research center and they seem to be doing research on ways to rapidly generate business models through a multi-touch collaborative device called SIMBU. As usual these multi-touch things get me all excited so I'm happy to tell you that professor Pieter Ballon from IBBT / iLab-o will be demonstrating this device during the 2-day workshop. Great!

I'm probably going to meet him in person this or next week after which I can tell you more on the device and its possibilities.


Some boring facts

- my office chair broke down so I went out to buy a new one... 6 week waiting period, arghhhh.
- as usually I ran out of printer ink on the worst possible moment, although it the warning sign has been blinking fore weeks I just ignored it. Off course the store was out of ink, again 2 days of waiting.
- bought myself a digital voice recorder to be used for interviewing companies for the Agile Stories Series


Training | Cold Calls

Alright, first of all I'm 1000% AGAINST making cold calls. But I have been trying to find ways to get people  to notice our trainings and events. One of the things you notice is that we are not in London or the US. It is actually very hard to convince people over here to get them all excited about new ideas. Most of the people just don't want to hear about innovation I guess. Or their budgets are still frozen due to the financial crisis.... yeah right. Anyway, I never thought it would be easy but I also never thought it would be this hard... we'll get there some way some how.

So I tried out cold calling on two companies being KBC and BNP Paribas Fortis. I thought why not give those old giants a call at least they sent out their employees on trainings more often than most companies. What happened was exactly what I imaged what would happen when placing a cold call... worst case experience with mankind and banks you can even imagine. I'll try to write a separate blog post about it somewhere during the day. It's a laugh...