As one of the organizers of Agile Tour Toronto I was thrilled with our success in attracting attendees – we sold out a month before the conference.  We decided that we would rather have a smaller conference with a good experience rather than a larger one that is more than we can manage in our first year running it.

To run the conference, we created a not-for-profit organization – Toronto Agile Software Development Community – with a mission of helping people and companies in the Toronto area with Agile techniques.  I was sad that we could not do more to help grow Agile in the community.

A few days ago, Yves Hanoulle, announced that he would like to do some training to help justify flying all the way to Toronto just for a one day conference.  I agreed to help and we are going to jointly run not one, but two workshops around the time of Agile Tour Toronto.  This will allow Yves to attend and present as well as provide an opportunity for those who can’t attend Agile Tour Toronto.  The works are:

Agile Kick Start – Monday, Oct. 19th

Agile Kick Start is for those new to agile as well as those interested in learning more about the technical pillar of Agile called XP.  We also talk about agile values, self-organizing teams, project vision, scaling agile, visual management, the famous XP game.

Agile Games Day – Wednesday, Oct. 21st

Agile Games Day provides hands-on experience with key Agile concepts through a day of learning by doing.  This includes defining business value, leadership/self-organization, and learning how to go faster using the Theory of Constraints.  If you haven’t tried before, this is a great way to learn and internalize concepts.

Why offer these sessions?

As organizers of Agile Tour Toronto, we noticed that there were a lot of people registering groups of people from their company to get basic training.  Hence the motivation for offering Agile Kick Start.

One of the things we talked about doing as part of Agile Tour Toronto was to run a games track since we know how important hands-on learning is.  Then we hit complications like finding more space, soliciting proposals and just didn’t have enough time.

Yves and I are really excited to be able to offer these workshops as a complement to Agile Tour Toronto and hope you can attend.