Feedback from the workshop – Agile Brazil 2011

First of all, I want to thank each and everyone who gave feedback on the workshop and activity: Don’t limit yourself. Based on your feedback I will be able to improve the workshop: Don’t limit yourself workshop – Agile Brazil 2011.

I did collect feedback at the session itself. I followed the same style used on QCon Sao Paulo last year. At the end of the session I had a bow, a few pen and cards (blue, yellow and pink; respectively great, medium, bad). The workshop attendees could write a few lines of feedback on the chosen card and drop it at the bow.

Here is the feedback written on these cards (in no particular order):

• More time required for the activity
• Please talk about techniques on negotiating Kanban limits with a client
• Interesting topic; activity could be more organized
• The activity consumed too much time.
• The game was good, but I wanted to hear more about the results.
• Replenishment + +
• The presentation was excellent; not enough time for the activity.
• Suggestion: add a timer for the activity.
• Excellent! Best talk on Agile
• Congratulations!
• I really like the target idea. I will try to put it in practice. The activity should be more organized; I suggest more time and control.
• Congrats. It was very good!
• Really good activity; I will put it in practice!
• The unique point of view on the flow was very pertinent. The activity really cool and gave me a practical view of the flow theory.
• Really cool activity!
• Print out the activity rules, and have make the roles more defined. For instance, you could have the pizza dude making decisions on where people work. There were too many people on the team making/trying to make decisions.

Based on these feedback and more I did receive verbally, I will do the following for the future of this workshop.

• Keep a version of the presentation without the activity. The presentation was very well received, and the time was under control. I might use it again for talking about Kanban, flow, and the target-variance score. Perhaps I can add a few slides explaining that experiments (such as the workshop activity at Agile Brazil) have show good results.

• For the workshop activity I will do the following improvements:

1. Make reusable cards. It was too much work to prepare, and I will not be able to reuse these cards.

2. Add a mark for amount of work completed in each card (50% done and 100% done)

3. Add a timer for each half day (for example: 1 minute for each half-day)

4. Keep the same numbers of people involved (1 BA, 5 Devs, 2 testers), but reduce the number of people making decisions on who should work in which card and stage (at most 3 people for each team).

5. Time box the activity

6. Have enough time for discussing the results (10 minutes at the end)

7. Have the card wall for each team already prepared on each team table. This should include the cards already on play on day 1 (now renamed to day 3). The theory on limits and targets is already covered during the presentation.

8. Have avatar for each team member ready (BAs, Devs and testers)

9. Simplify the rules (consolidate it), and have it visible at the wall

10. Have a calendar to show the days passing by (again, visible on the wall)

11. Have one person for each two teams to answer questions (co-presenter)

Please let me know if oyu have any more feedback. And once again, thanks for the feedback!