I have already submitted one session to Agile 2010, and I don’t know what else to submit for the year. I’d like to leave one slot open for a potential collaboration (hint, hint), but as for a solo session, what do you think I could present or facilitate that you’d spend 90 minutes of your precious time attending? I’d prefer to do something new, which means no “Integration Tests Are A Scam” and no “XP: My Greatest Misses”, but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t run a session on this topics.

You could help me by outlining what you might see in a session description in the Agile 2010 program that would attract you over the other sessions. Perhaps I can deliver that very session!

Thanks for your help.

Just a quick announcement: I will appear at Agile Bazaar in Boston with Niraj Khanna with a talk entitled Your Agile Sales Approach Sucks Stinks! or, Effective Agile Sales:
A Good Suit and a Great Pitch Just Doesn’t Cut it Anymore. Our talk centers on applying the strategic selling model of Miller to selling agile concepts. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an employee selling the idea of agile to your co-workers and manager or an independent service provider selling the idea of agile to prospective customers: you need to stop treating agile like a simple sale and instead understand a model that helps guide you through your sale.

Please join us!

It’s conference proposal season, and I have recently had a proposal rejected from XP 2009 entitled “Your Agile Sales Approach Sucks”. The tutorial focuses on the difference between a simple and complex sale, with the thesis that one must sell any kind of agile transition or practice adoption as a complex sale, whereas most people continue to try to sell it as a simple sale. One of the reviewers labeled the title as “uselessly provocative” and, while he didn’t reject on that basis, might have rated the proposal down due to the title. Another organization asked us to change the title before we presented it at their user group.

Now I chose the title as an homage to the book Your Marketing Sucks, whose author calls his approach “extreme marketing”. I thought our society generally accepted “sucks” in a way they didn’t 15-20 years ago. Perhaps I have that wrong. I’d like your help to find out.

Please leave a comment to help me understand how people react to a tutorial or user group session entitled “Your Agile Sales Approach Sucks”, focusing on the word “sucks”.

Would you like to support a local software user group or community event? I have begun a speaker sponsorship program with a twist: free consulting.

When you support a local software user group by sponsoring me to speak at their meetings or conferences, you receive a sponsorship package including a half day of remote consulting, coaching, pairing or training. All this for only CAD 495. (Canadian sponsors pay GST.)

Most local software user groups have to raise money to invite well-known out-of-town speakers. They have a few avenues: local fundraisers, local benefactors, and the Agile Alliance speaker reimbursement program. Most such organizations, however, don’t have fundraising experience, and the Agile Alliance’s program still has a relatively limited budget. The people who started these groups didn’t plan to become expert fundraisers, so let them benefit from your sponsorship to bring me to speak to them.

The Speaker Sponsorship Package includes

• two 90-minute remote consulting sessions on the topics of your choosing
• acknowledgement on the user group or event web site of your sponsorship
• acknowledgement on jbrains.ca of your sponsorship
• acknowledgement during my talk of your sponsorship
• acknowledgement during all my 2009 conference talks of your sponsorship

Acknowledgement includes your (or your company’s) name, logo and a link or pointer to your website.

I will conduct your consulting sessions with Skype (http://www.skype.com) and its screen sharing feature. You need a headset, a webcam and a high-speed internet connection. You can use your sessions to do the following:

• work with me as a pair partner: programming, writing stories, designing business tests, personal planning, and more
• map your value stream, identify bottlenecks, and devise plans to deal with them
• run a code review or planning meeting
• ask for my advice on issues of design, testing, planning, teamwork, communication, installing practices
• suggest your own session, and as long as I believe I can help you, I will do it

Upcoming sponsorship opportunities:

• Sponsor the Agile Bazaar, the top agile user group in New England, where Niraj Khanna and I will explain on March 26, 2009 why Your Agile Sales Approach Sucks!
• Sponsor my appearance at Code Retreat 2, where I will help Patrick Wilson-Welsh and his crew give programmers a place to practice their technique.

Unfortunately, you cannot use your sessions to do classroom training. If you would like to hire me to train your team or organization, please read about my training services.

I have proposed a 90-minute talk entitled “An Introduction to Agile Through the Theory of Constraints”. Please review it. Thanks.