SPA 2010 – PDD & other interesting stuff

A big thank you to all the attendees of our Persona Driven Development (PDD) workshop at SPA 2010. This was the first ever external lead session of ours and what a great conference for Duncan and I to debut at. We thank you all for your energy in the session and we were delighted with your positive feedback, we will certainly be coming back!

A Narrative Journey Map (NJM) that one of the groups produced (thanks Rachel Davies) along with some of our own photos:

You can find the session presentation here http://prezi.com/fdtw81ulk_xh/

And Duncan’s blog on Narrative Journey Maps (NJMs) here Narrative journey maps

Sessions that stood out for me were:

• USwitch: Creating a Lean Business from the inside out – the bird cage example was awesome on failing fast and the ingenious idea of sacking the QA team to ensure quality is baked in, were my particular favourites.
• Effective Retrospectives by Rachel Davies: Phew, more effective ways to really understand and get to the root cause of issues, other than the very mundane “what went well, what didn’t”.
• The Sword and other Tales by the chaps at new bamboo: An original and creative session with the energy just oozing from the company. Couple of tips… Schedule meetings at odd times like 10:23 to ensure promptness; don’t defer, do it now if you can, now, now, now; heat seeking actions with boolean check for easy follow-up.
• Solve Conflicts without compromise by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe: It’s in our nature to jump in and find the solution before really challenging and understanding the problem. This is a great technique with surprising results which will make you challenge assumptions and find a solution that you never thought was possible through using the “Conflict Resolution Diagram”. You will also find some very useful sessions and tools at Pascal’s website http://www.agilecoach.net/

See you all next year.