Craig is at YOW! Conference and spends some time with Emily Webber, Agile Coach and author of “Building Successful Communities of Practice” and “The Agile Team Onion” and they chat about:

• The UK Government Digital Service and gov.uk (and the United States Digital Service and Australian Digital Transformation Agency)
• Government needs to be fast and stable (but dealing with change every four years)
• YOW! 2016 talk “Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of your Agile Organisation“
• Communities of practice are about building knowledge, giving people support networks they need to give them the confidence to do their jobs well and making that practice better and as good as it can be
• Most communities of practice are organic but they tend to be closed and often lack direction
• Community of Practice Maturity Model
• Having an idea of who the community is for and…

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and get the opportunity to sit down with Dave Thomas, signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and have a great discussion about:

• Dave’s talk “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)“
• Agile as a word has become meaningless, don’t follow the off-the-shelf processes, apply small corrections to move forward
• Story of Stone Soup is like Agile consultancies, the hard work is done by the companies
• Scrum is a good starting point due to its simplicity
• Raccoon is a noun, so not a good replacement name for Agile, because you can buy a pound of it
• 1,000 working on one thing can never be Agile, you have to make enterprises agile before you can run an agile project
• The values in the Agile Manifesto hold up well, would have been nice to have had more diversity, had no expectation they were…