XPDays London 2010 - an Amazing Event

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The 2010 XPDay in London was an amazing experience and my thanks go to the organisers and all the many people that gave great open space sessions and experience reports.

Not since the 2009 Lean & Kanban exchange at SkillsMatter have I been so engergised after an event (and I have been to quite a few great events this year). I feel I have learnt so much in these two days that it will take me all the holidays to digest (and blog about) everything. Here are some of my experiences from the event.

The open space format worked very well for me and produced some great sessions. A great job by Mike Sutton for introducing the open space approach in a very clear way.

It was amazing to see so many people wanting to talk about such a wide range of subjects and it was often a challenge to decide what to go to, but as Mike made clear, it was easy for us to move between sessions.

I enjoyed giving my experience report on Taking kanban to the masses, where I describe some of the practices I have used to help convey understanding of the kanban method and how to visualise your work effectively. Hopefully will be able to catch up with the videos of the other experience reports on the SkillsMatter.com website. I liked the idea of having one organised track, to give you some up front idea of what could be covered in the open spaces.

As for the venue itself, I liked just using the upstairs rooms of SkillsMatter, it seemed to maintain a closeness throughout the two days and helped create a safe environment for people to share their thoughts and ideas. Good food for lunch too, especially the pasta.

The biggest challenge we had with the event was people judging the popularity of there talks. As the venue had one smaller room there was a few occasions where we had to swap. Perhaps we could do a quick raise of hand for those interested in a talk when put on the wall, so that popular talks are put in a big room.

I am really looking forward to the event in 2011 and would be interested in getting more involved, perhaps even helping organise the event.

Session Hightlights

There were so many great sessions on the day that I did not get to see everything I wanted. The session highlights that I remember so far and will write more on are as follows

• Kanban 1’s Game with Jon Jagger
• Forward Internet 25 release per day with no unnecessary overhead
• Ideal University course - lots of philosophy, learning how to learn, etc…

There are many more, including a few by Benjamin Mitchell that should be up there. I did missed out on the session about personnas by Sarah Lawfull, so will be looking for a write up about that one.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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