XP Days Benelux 2008

Already five years XPDays Benelux is my favorite event of the year.

Content over Commerce
People over process
small over big
local over international
first time presenters over famous people

This year was the best edition ever.

Dave already explained that the organizers walk their talk [Although I’m on the organisers list, I say they as I did not contribute that much.]
I’m a big fan of the perfection game, as you can see here,  here and here (Sexual contect).

As our session had less feedback this year, I’m not sure the perfection worked that well this year.
Because of my second year of GTO training I was limited in time for this years XP Day Benelux.

 

I only went to Nicole’s and Dave’s sessions. (Not following my rule about PairCoaching session. ) I will publish my perfections on these later.The same for my experience with my own session.

I want to focus now on the event.
I have used persona’s before in my work and they really add value to how you design the software. Using them for designing a conference and conference sessions was new to me, but it really helped.
On top of that I loved the Persona’s game . It’s really a fun way to get to know new people. By the way, I was an Ellen. I could have been just as well a Bram. but I choose to be an Ellen.

The Games night was also new. I have send a lot of people to the games night, but ended up not going myself. Mmm, that’s a feedback a lot of coaches and trainers get…

I was surprised by the Kanban board, I hope a lot of events take this approach.

the Oomps after all these years I still find them one of the most fun parts of the conference, except for maybe the pomp  (participants one minute presentations at the end of the day)

The closing of the first day by Aikido. During the GTO we start a lot of times the day by exercises that open up energy in my body (There it is typically Bio Energetics.) The start of the aikido felt the same. More of these, but I prefer at the start of the day.

The Visu Wall, I loved. (You can find pictures of it on my XpDay Benelux flick set )

This year I did not meet that many new people, I hardly had time to talk to my old friends.

I hope you liked the event.

If you want to stay in touch, feel free to connect on the XP-be and xp-nl mailing lists or on the Linkedin XPDay group

Conference month

As predicted in august, since my new job as Agile project manager at the Belgium post I hardly have time to write blog post.

This month is conference month:
Tomorrow I will present the PairCoaching.net Agile game at XP Day Benelux. It’s a game that wants to learn people some basics about how working in a agile team works. That will be the fourth year in a row I am doing a game together with my father at this XP conference.
Unfortunately I have to leave the conference friday to follow part of my GTO course. Bummer.

On 8 december I will present the famous agile Loops at Devoxx (Formely known as JavaPolis)

On 12 December Vera Peeters and I will deliver a workshop on Team compensation at XP Days London

I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net