Sorry I’ve been more than a bit busy lately, working as an independent coach is very rewarding and time consuming. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing work reviewing sessions for the Manifesting Agility Stage at Agile2009: “This Stage is all about tools and techniques for rapidly developing a deep understanding of the empirical Agile mindset, and then rapidly applying it—as individuals, and as groups.” As a you can imagine even with only 87 proposals this is a very time consuming process. Our stage has 1440 minutes allotted and 3750 minutes of proposals.

Its been hard work, first up in theory we should provide every proposal a proper review even if its only a few sentences. While I tried that and I was able to provide comments (visible to the public) or reviews (visible only to the author and other reviewers) – I commented on or reviewed 50+ sessions (across all the stages). Sorry too everyone who’s session didn’t get a review. There are only three of us who are actually doing the work on this stage and we just can’t provide notes to all of you. Consider these notes your comments.

My number one discovery many proposal authors aren’t providing enough detail for either me or the attendees. Consider for me a reviewer I need to decide why to give you a chunk of our tiny stage. I need to see what the subject is, how you will present it. You need to sell. I need to understand how you will present – will it be a straight talk? will there be an interactive session? What will the interactive session be etc.? The longer your proposed session the more you need to sell. For a 45 minute experience report you can say less – but if you expect 90 minutes or even 180 you had better be clear and I need to see what value people will get. If its just a straight talk and its 90 minutes long what can you tell me about why audience will sit and listen for the whole time. People I seen present before will have an easier time here – I know that Mary Poppendieck can be very captivating even when she’s just reading slides. The rest of us are not. I know that Jean Tabaka always has engaging and interesting sessions.

If you asked for 180 minutes – we had 17 proposals of that length, but each will consume 1/8th of our stage budget. For something this long it had better be amazing especially since attendees will have to contend with some of their workshop partners leaving halfway through. We had 4-5 that would all be amazing but for the time constraints can only pick one.

Experience Reports: “captures the story of a real agile project, summarizing what happened on the project and the key learning points” – these are generally 45 minutes long so when you propose a 90 minute experience we want to know why will the audience sit that long to hear your story. This really is a case of less is more.

Also remember what you write in your proposal not only has to sell the reviewers it also has to sell the attendees. This is all they will have to decide whether your session will be a exciting or a snooze.

Mechanics

Onto the mechanics and my discoveries. First I liked last years approach with the whole community being able to vote on sessions and using the wisdom of crowds for best to be found. However I gather there were problems, in some cases authors had their friends vote up their sessions thereby gaming the system. In addition a system like that means that the more well known a person the better their sessions will do. So Jeff S. and Mary P. will get their sessions voted up almost no matter what they write. Whereas completed unknowns had a much tougher time. This years system while harder work for the reviewers at least levels the playing ground a bit. Hopefully we will find a more elegant approach in future years.

On the whole the submission system with reviews and comments has worked fairly well, but here’s what I wish were different.

• Authors need to know that proposals are being reviewed/commented and that replies/updates are a critical part of the acceptance process.
• Authors need to be notified when a comment/review is added.
• People who write comments/reviews need to know when replies are made
• RSS is not the the only notification system some of use still prefer email.
• The difference between comments and reviews needs to be made more clear.
• “Browse session proposals” page needs to display the length of the sessions. It makes it easier to make decisions if we know their length.
• Proposal database should exportable to spreadsheet. A web page is handy but once the hard work begins it would be alot easier if I could just work in Excel or even Google Docs.
• I don’t want recommendations visible to the proposal author. These are often friends and colleagues who I want to work with again. This maybe true today but I can’t tell.
• …

I realize alot of work has gone into making a usable submission system and my suggestions just create more but these would help the authors by knowing what matters next year and the reviewers by reducing the burden. I also understand that many great sessions won’t get accepted because not enough detail was provided.

Next blog posting will be back on track with something of more interest to most.

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