#businessagility

Highlights about the AgileCamp Dallas Edition 2017

Hello Everyone!

2017 has been a great year full of good challenges! New clients, several sessions (design thinking, innovation, agile workshops), new countries, new cultures, new friends, talkings and approximately 600 people whom have attended those cool events I was part of but prior to year´s end, I want to share great memories from the AgileCamp that took place in Dallas by December 1^st.

This is a special event to me not only by its dimension and level of importance within the innovation and agile global community but as well as milestone in my personal life in sharing the stage and meeting such amazing people that I admire such as Scott Ambler, Ahmed Sidky and David Marquet.

In this opportunity, I did talk about #innovation #agility practices and the agile mind set in driving a culture of innovation mixing up my background in music performance and composition.

The focus was in to incorporate such practices and use them in a disciplined way to create possibilities, take actions, get results and hopefully generate new beliefs in an iterative way.

I had the great pleasure to meet Ahmed Sidky, Head of Development Management, Rio Games. Mr. Sidky has delivered a great talking about Evolving Agile Leadership at Riot Games. Amazing story of challenging convention. This is the legendary game company behind the League of Legends which by the way I am an addicted player!

Scott Ambler has presented about How to Overcome the Challenges of Adopting Agile in Established Enterprises. I follow Scott´s work for years and he is one of the creators of DAD – Disciplined Agile Delivery along with Mark Lines. Unfortunately, I could not attend Scott´s talking as I was presenting at the same time but glad we were able to catch up and share the same table during lunch!

Finally, but not least, the great Stacey Louie, AgileCamp Founder and Managing Director at Hyperdrive Agile Leadership. I loved the event´s format! Thanks for having me in to share my experience and thoughts.

Thanks to the volunteer´s team and special thanks to David Tochukwu and Arnel Cayabyad! Long live to the AgileCamp future editions!

Take care! Raf!

Highlights about the Congreso en Direcíon de Proyectos Guadalajara 2017

I know it has been a while since I have talked about #innovation #agility practices in this wonderful conference organized by the PMI Guadalajara Chapter but I could not let it go without sharing some highlights from amazing talkings that I was blessed to hear! Special thanks to my friend Miguel Castañeda for the invitation to be part of this remarkable event!

By September 29^th, the day was beautiful and I have arrived one hour earlier at Auditorio Pedro Arrupe ITESO. I did register myself and set a couple of things prior to my talking. I did grab some coffee, hanged out with my friends from IBM México and meet folks from the PMI Guajajara Chapter: Mario Muñoz and Jose Luis Gomez

Regarding the first talking of the day, Alecia Hoobing did a great job in sharing cool stories about her experience within product management area. She has presented the 10 Core Values for Building Innovative Products and walk us through each powerful value and how to put it into action starting with ourselves! If you handle innovation in your work I do recommend you to print it out and attached it to the wall!

Secondly, Dr. Roberto Osorno Hinojosa, researcher and project manager at ITESO Jesuit University has presented in a very funny and graceful way about Open Innovation: Lessons from focusing on clients.

Dr. Roberto has shared great insights about the benefits of the open innovation. In general, we thought that innovation is related with the latest tech buzz thing but Roberto´s approach in showing how to do it using real local examples was quite impressive. Pretty much the same way as described in the Open Innovation Garage website: Effective, easy and affordable. Long live to the Open Innovation Garage!

The next talking was about Digital Era and how to manage such transformation presented by my friend Victor Hugo Estrada. What has caught my attention was how Vic did walk us through how the digital era and most importantly how to mix it all up nicely: Digital transformation, Design Thinking, Lean UX, Agile and Lean Optimization. Nice way to “fusion” it all together!

After Victor, I did present my thoughts on Innovation Agility practices in driving incremental and disruptive innovation. I have shared some approaches using real examples from the Relativity Theory, Frozen Food to the Ipod eras as well about how to shit your mind to looking for good problems instead of generating ton of new ideas without focus. In such scenario, collaboration is a must and you should distinguish where your organization are in terms of Collaboration vs Cooperation practices. It is big deal!

Then, how to apply some innovation agility practices in your day to day activities to unleash your creativity in order to generate positive impacts to your team, organization and your community.

And finally, I am glad I was on the stage prior to Mr. Kumamoto because he just rocked the place down! 🙂

What a great and powerful message about team working, collaboration and courage! Mr. Pedro Kumamoto is an activist, culture agent and he does represent the District 10 at the Congress of Jalisco Estate. He is the first independent candidate to win an election via popular representation. He is also an activist and culture.

Pedro has shared great stories about his journey until became a congress man. He talked about how his team used free online tools to manage pools, engage the community and the importance of having an engaged team that are willing to move mountains for a good cause. By the way, although Pedro Kumamoto did not mention about it, a ton of agile values and practices were presented as key aspects for a new agile way of working.

Stay tune for the next PMI gathering!Take care! Raf

Innovation Agility Talk @AgileCamp in USA

Hello Everyone!

I am glad to be part of such great conference as well super glad for the opportunity to speak about one of my passions in the #agilecamp Dallas Edition this year. Innovation and Agility!

This event take place across USA country, bringing together professionals from the Agile community for a day of exciting education, activities and networking. Presentations are led by Agile experts and touch on the newest tools and Agile methodologies. Activities are exciting workshops that put techniques to the test and advance professional skills. While receptions and breaks bring the Agile community together for a valuable opportunity to network with industry leading professionals.

EARLY BIRD deadline is fast approaching and is good only through this Friday, 11/17! If you are nearby do not miss this opportunity! I will be talking about the Agile Mindset in Driving a Culture of Innovation (http://agilecamp.org/dallas)

So, how the innovation agility mindset can improve our mainstream approach in creating and maintaining new and current products and services? Are we in the correct path?

Currently, many organizations have been spending precious resources in searching the next big disruptive idea then I do invite you to explore the innovation agility practices to uncovering good problems related to your business, your customers and new emerging markets.

Let´s explore a new perspective touching key cultural aspects of agility focusing on how to develop innovative approaches to incorporate a new way of work adopting key innovation agility practices considering the human needs and cultural aspects as key factors to create better products and services for today and tomorrow´s markets.

See you all in Dallas! Take care! Raf

Business Agility 2017 in New York – Day 1 Review

February was the month selected for the first Business Agility Conference. In the core, authentic short stories and deep dive sessions focusing on organization design, marker disruption, product innovation and agile leadership. I want to share some highlights from both days that have caught my attention as well some interesting insights after eight deep dive sessions.

Introducing Business Agility

Steve Denning has opened up the conference with a very powerful insight: Agile is a mindset. That is it! In addition, Steve has explained about the friction that exist when you try to move forward with your agile team surrounded by a ton of bureaucracy making all transformation efforts being not sustainable. He has shared stories from big tech companies that have embraced agile in the core (mindset) and now these companies are thriving their way focusing on delighting customers. Using the Copernican example to illustrate how clients becomes the center of every decisions, Steve highlighted the importance of the agile culture that enable companies to move from a centric view to client centric view, surrounding their clients looking for ways to inspect and adapt their strategies into tactical plans that are based 100% on client’s needs.

Phil Abernathy has presented the maze and madness! Great insights on how structuring your business for agility. In other words, get rid of the madness and the maze! Phil has provided thoughts and examples on how such business structure looks like. First, understand the size and complexity of your maze: several hierarchical levels cross management systems, dozens of communication layers and complex metric systems. Then, here we are! Lost in the maze, trying to find maze runners that can help in finding the way out. The outputs (not outcomes)? Spending millions on isolated transformation initiatives, new buzz leadership roles and new departments organized in the same way but with fancy names and the madness is back again. Phil proposes a structured way to understand the impacts (unhappy customers, shareholders, and employees), symptoms and then the real root causes (complex organization structure, lack of trust and transparency, leadership talent). Start with big goals such as 40% reduction of time to market, 70 to 500% cycle time improvement, 30% cost reduction then test your hypotheses via pilots, inspect and adapt, course corrections and make it big from the core. Continue reading →

Business Agility Conference 2017

Hello Everyone! I was counting the days for this conference on business agility! This is the first conference of its kind. There are many cool topics, great people as speakers, thought leaders and deep dive sessions that will blow your mind with new ideas. The topics will be presented on a TED format and will cover the following:

Introducing Business Agility
Governance & Strategy
Leadership & Empowerment
Leading the Transformation
People & Engagement
Fearless Change

I will contribute as a facilitator in the deep dive sessions and I will be sharing new ideas and thoughts along the week. For more information, please click on the logo above. See you all there!