Last month our team went to Agile Trends, an event in São Paulo where discussions revolved mainly around Agility in software projects.

Starting the event activities, Niels Pflaeging presented a keynote where he defends Agile alone is not sufficient to taking organizations to the Knowledge Era, and that deeper transformations are necessary for doing that. He started it with an overview of the History of Management, why bigger companies are structured the way we know them and what he believes needs to change so they can adapt to the new reality and remain competitive.

After the keynote, the so-called “Trend talks” started. Each Trend Talk session was composed of two 18min talks revolving the same theme, followed by a 20min discussion round. In the Trend talks, most of what was presented and discussed was related to the challenges companies face when adopting agile.

During such presentations, most of the success cases presented how companies have adopted the Agile principles but adapted the practices to their own realities, be it a startup or a bigger corporation. Which is similar to what we’ve been doing in our own projects: whenever we start a new engagement we use our custom methodology as a Starting Point and, as we get to know more about our clients, we adapt it to better suit their realities.

Other presentations also showcased some of the Change Management challenges that companies have to face in order to make this work. These topics are similar to our own challenges when engaging client projects, and it was interesting hearing the struggles from other professionals so we can make sure to always keep our toolbox up to date.

The event also contemplated some workshops, and we joined one that had Kanban as its theme. In this workshop, we honed our skills while running an imaginary pizza place (too bad the pizzas weren’t real) and as we progressed in the game, we could also buy adjustments to our workflow in an “upgrade store” using the cash we made. The point was to get us thinking about how our decisions affected the business’ performance and profitability. Besides that, we also joined a workshop about Learning 3.0, where the participants were divided in small groups and each group had a real problem to work on. We had to understand, share experiences related to the problem and discuss ideas about how to solve it. In this workshop we had the opportunity to work with people from other companies with different backgrounds, which contributed to bringing different perspectives to the discussions.

Finally, we also attended some interesting Keynotes addressing themes that were not directly related to Agile, such as Internet Privacy and the Internet of Things. Even though not directly related to project management methodologies, they were nice in the sense they help us keep our minds open to other trends related to the tech landscape.

Being part of the event was a great opportunity to see how events related to Agile have gained increased traction during the past couple of years. It was also nice meeting old friends there, as well as meet new people.

Have you also been to Agile Trends? Did any of the talks catch your attention in special? Please let us know it in the comments.