Agile2010 - Part 4 - Why you suck at offshoring even with agile

Needless to say that this is the biggest challenge I faced so far in my career life.. To speak at agile 2010 conference for the 1^st time.

Everything sounded challenging form the day 1, first to be one of the few selected speakers out of closer to 1000 proposals, 2^nd it was in US, 3^rd, it was a pair presentation which I have never used to do before, 4^th I knew and heard that Agile conference is really a challenging place to be in as people who come there coming for a real purpose, they are tough, in thrust of knowledge and very interactive in sessions… It all proved true to me from the day 1 at the conference.

So with all these.. Dave and myself prepared the presentation ( all virtual ;-) ).., Which was an interesting story.. We will discuss this on Monday (6^th Sep) during the retrospective we are going to do.

On Thursday 2^nd morning session under “Distributed and large scale agile stage” was ours.. It was again challenging to decide how to dress for the presentation.. (Sounds more feminine? )
The challenge was that in agile conference most the presenters wore T shirts , shorts and Jeans..They looked very causal.. .. I knew Dave would do the same.. But still I’m not used to this. So I thought of wearing my usual pair of Grey jeans and a Black office shirt.. (Sigh.. I wish if I had some pictures or recording of the presentation… After the presentation only we realized that we couldn’t request for a single picture.. which was terrible.. and I’m sorry for that…)

Few good signs : Room was getting full.. which was cool.. I would not make up myself to present in an empty room..

Bad things.. this huge projector stand covered some of the audience..and top of that Dave had to use one fixed mike while I was using the wireless mike. So he had to stand still while I was all over. One attendee mentioned that my voice was low for few times … I think the way I fixed the mike to my shirt.... it was moving a bit…

Not too sure good or bad thing :) Dave started his tweeting via iphone.. Which made me creepy :-) Uh.. Commooonnn You are tweeting while we are in the presentation.. Give me a break.. But he was so cool... He just wanted to tweet..

Getting ready to present "Why You Suck At Offshoring- Even with Agile" with @Thush at #Agile2010 would be a good reminder to other attendees

After disappointing you all about recording and pictures I have one good news to you... We are doing a video conference on retro as Dave is in US and Im in Sri Lanka., So possibly we will record it for you. Stay tuned for that ;-)

Here for you .. Some of the interesting slides which helped us to get the audience interactions effortlessly..

We discussed the important points anyone should consider in an agile offshore project initiation, and the areas where you can go wrong easily... loads of examples here...



Dave brought up some real cool examples of working with Asian team while he is working in USA.. the point here was.. "We both have layers" as Shrek said to Donkey..




This was an interesting debate.. how you should position your contracts in offshore market without killing the idea of being agile.. what will do and not do..


The important one ;-)