Agility Night Live - TV Sketches and Project Stories
Concept: Work like you’re producing a live weekly TV variety show.
Description: A glimpse behind the scenes of the production of a weekly show like Saturday Night Live offers an incredible example of a team of people who have agility in their DNA. Writers, actors, set designers, producers, studio execs, etc. all have a single-minded focus on delivering an exceptional quality show every single week. Slipping the schedule is not an option. Customer satisfaction (viewer ratings) are the central measure of success. The production team must collaborate and adapt to unexpected challenges every single week.
This talk will include a series of video clips from behind the scenes on the Saturday Night Live set as well as clips from the (now cancelled) NBC series “Studio 60: Live From Sunset Strip”. I will use each clip to demonstrate and highlight the key principles, behaviors, and habits of highly agile teams and individuals. I will challenge the audience to imagine that they are “producing a weekly TV show” as members of agile teams and agile organizations. I’ll raise such questions as:
• What role do you play in the production of your organization’s weekly live TV show(s)?
• How do you contribute to the goal of producing a high quality show every Friday night?
• How does the agile team keep its focus on viewer ratings?
I will use my experience as an agile trainer, coach, mentor, and technical team member to share:
• Stories about what works well and barriers to success
• Key guiding principles that promote agile DNA & quality thinking throughout the organization
Value Statement: Many of the presentations/workshops/tutorials at the agile conference focus on specific practices and practice tuning. This talk will complement those other sessions by helping participants think about the value of changing habits and behaviors in addition to adopting practices. Most of us in the agile community have seen agile teams that can exercise the practices but still behave in “waterfallish” ways. We’ve also seen or experienced those teams that truly have agility in the bloodstream. It affects everything the team does, and the way that everyone approaches everything. This talk focuses on helping teams develop their agile DNA to become the latter type of team.
I’ve given this presentation to smaller audiences in the past year. My presentation is a PowerPoint slide deck with embedded video (and audio) clips. Each video clip is a distinct example of a key behavior or habit that is part of agile DNA. The talk is an interactive talk in which I present a video clip and what it represents followed by a dialog with the audience about how to map the example into their agile culture. In this way the presentation, discussion, and Q&A are interspersed throughout the presentation.
Ideally I would like to connect my laptop to the PA system in the room. However, I will provide a set of powered PC speakers for the audio portion of the presentation.