Report from the Agile2022 program team
As I write this, I am flying back to Buffalo after a weekend of planning the Agile 2022 Conference in Nashville. It was a fabulously productive weekend spent with passionate and dedicated people.
As Conference Chair, it has been awesome and intimidating to plan this event. Thankfully, the program team and I don’t have to deal with the logistics of facility planning, food, and beverage, rooms, etc. Our brief is the content of the conference, keynotes, speakers, panels, and miscellaneous content.
I wanted to write to the Agile community to let you know what was on our minds as we sat down to plan this year’s conference. The fact that the last two years have not gone the way anyone wanted has an extremely tiny upside: we have the ability to approach this year’s conference as almost a new event.
Keeping that in mind, we are not making a bunch of radical changes to an event thousands of people love. We are addressing some of the feedback we have received from attendees over the last several years and making some changes in response.
The problem with peanut butter
One of the persistent themes we have heard from attendees, especially first-timers, is that the conference content comes at them like a wave. They are overwhelmed by choice and do not know how to choose which sessions to attend without feeling a tremendous sense of FOMO.
You may be familiar with the shampoo problem, where consumers in the shampoo aisle at the supermarket are so flooded by the sheer number of options for washing their hair that they just kind of give up and grab something. Attendees have often done the same thing, looking at either the printed program or the daily schedule board and the nineteen tracks and fifteen or more concurrent sessions with visible frustration on their faces.
Related to this is one of community. How do we arrange the program to increase the probability that attendees will have something in common to talk about with people they meet at lunch or in the exhibit hall?
One of the theories I have in relation to these problems is that we have spread the content across the conference like peanut butter. Now, I bow to no one in my love of All-Natural Creamy Skippy, but providing a more structured scaffolding to hang the program on might help the conference attendees shape their decisions.
Providing more in-depth discussion
The final issue we are trying to address this year is one of depth. How do we provide space and opportunity for more in-depth discussions and equally important, extended dives into Agile practice? 75-minute talks/workshops have been our standard format for the last ten years or so, and while we are keeping that session format, we are looking at ways to provide speakers and workshop facilitators a forum to take attendees on a more extensive journey.
Those are the things that Jen Krieger, Cat Swetel, Cheryl Hammond, and I are trying to address as part of the program team this year. I will be writing a follow-up post giving you information on the experiments we are taking on for Agile2022 to improve the conference experience. It should be online in the next few days.
Without hyperbole, I am genuinely excited about what we have in store for you at Agile2022 in July.
