Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2010! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 9th and 10th, 2010, in the Seattle Center Northwest Rooms. Please see http://www.agileopennorthwest.org for registration information and further details.

We invite you to our fourth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our third annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $125.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. Registration is open now. We look forward to seeing you there.

It's happened to the best of us. We hold or participate in a great retrospective with high energy and then…nothing. Retrospectives that identify key learnings but don't cause us to adapt and improve as a team can leave us feeling stalled. With no follow up, teams may no longer see the value of holding these key agile ceremonies and sometimes abandon them altogether.

Why does this continue to be a challenge for Agile teams? What can we do to make retrospectives useful and a key enabler of continuous learning and improvement in our teams? How do we bring the high energy and insightful discussion to our retrospectives and keep that momentum for change going?

We invite you to join us and share your experiences in leading great retrospectives or listen to other agile practitioners share theirs. We will explore what might cause lack of action and identify practical steps we can take to get the most out of our team retrospectives.

Please note that this month we are meeting on the third Friday, Dec 15 to avoid the holiday rush.

Seating is limited. Please RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/255398925/

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly"

Great! We can get a lot of juice and improvement tuning and adjusting our behavior within the team. And then....

• We get pressure to share our results outside of the team and as soon as we do the team clams up.
• We hit an impediment that is in the soup - outside of our ability to address within the team.
• We start to see patterns across teams.

Whether you are a master at organizational change or just starting out, join us in what's bound to be a lively discussion. We'll all walk away with something new to try.