Slides from “An Agile Retrospective” at codepaLOUsa 2013

One of the major take-home stories not me toned in the slides is to not define your identity by your process. Don’t trap yourself in a less than optimal process by proclaiming it’s the right way, or the one true way. From the start, accept the idea (and let others know) that your overall process is a slowly changing dimension in your enterprise. Leave yourself room to adapt and grow as you and your team becomes more practiced and new tools/techniques emerge.

If you attended my talk, I deeply apologize for the technical issues. Karma’s a bitch, for sure. Run-through in my room before the talk went great, with the most up-to-date slides. Being too smart to leave Powerpoint open while I came downstairs, I closed everything down. Joking with Steve from Geeks and Gurus about his projector and my new laptop was all in fun (Steve and I have known each other for several years now, poking fun at one another is nothing new). Perhaps also making sarcastic remarks about demo gremlins, Windows 8 and the conference wifi was tempting fate a little too much. I’m still perplexed as to whether “Your changes cannot be discarded” would have been a good thing or a bad thing. In addition to the out of date slide deck I had to use, this website was down, and my laptop blue screened right as I walked out of the room. So it was exciting. From what I can gather, between the time I logged onto the conference wifi and opening my slides I must have been knocked off the network, so a local cache of an older version was found, and why I could never get the latest slides loaded. My laptop wasn’t displaying that I was disconnected, the cause of which may have been part of the BSOD.

Anyhow, my site seems to be working again, I got the laptop happy and was able to recover the correct slides from SkyDrive. Without further ado, here are the annotated slides for An Agile Retrospective. Note: file is hosted on SkyDrive, but it should be a public link.