Thinking Distributed to Improve Agility

Note this is a reposting of some older material. The article has been given a date that reflects the time that this event occured so it will appear chronologically in the articles list

Today (2nd Nov 2011) I gave a talk titled "Thinking Distributed to Improve Agility" at JAX 2011 in London. This was the first talk in the Architecture track on the second day of the conference. In some sense this was bleed over from Agile Day yesterday, but the reason for this being in ths Architecture track was because this talked to the architecture of teams within an organisation. Now that is interesting...

2011 has been a busy year for me for coference talks. Three conferences, three different talks and all quite different! This one though is one of my favourite talks because it pulls together insights and learnings from many years as a practitioner and offers some genuine insight that is often overlooked. Moreover it does something that I love to see in other talks that have stuck with me over the years: it challenges the perceived wisdom of the community.

The premise of the talk was that, contrary to poplar belief (and "accepted wisdom"), distributed teams exhibit characteristics that can make it easier for them to transition to agile and improve their agility. In contrast co-located teams can somehow struggle to transition and be agile. I take a look at organisational patterns and crowd communication in an attempt to explain why this might be the case. To learn why and a few more things besides you can take a look at the slides...