AgilePrague - Agile and Scrum Blog

Join the 10th anniversary of the Agile Prague Conference

I started organizing a conference because I wanted to bring interesting people to the Czech Republic, to Prague where I live. I wanted to give people here some sort of feeling of what it means to be agile across the globe, how different organizations do things, what is a hot topic nowadays in the world, and give them an opportunity for two days to learn from the best agile speakers.

The first year we started small and run an experiment as a track of the WebExpo conference and because people liked it, we decided to start a full dedicated conference called Agile Prague. This year we are celebrating a 10^th year anniversary. I guess time flies.

Agile Prague is always on Mon-Tue in September so you can enjoy the weekend in Prague and connect pleasure with a bit of learning. We start creating a program already in January, while I speak & travel for different events, I also search for interesting speakers and inspirational stories so many of our speakers are joining on our invitation.

This year you can join us on Mon-Tue Sep 19-20, 2022. We are having two parallel tracks of short practical talks, where people can deep dive into the topics during the open space each day. The entire conference is in English and the topic is “Sustainable Agility”.

To give you some idea about the program, we have several keynotes presented this year:

Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm will help you to “Improve Transformation results in corporate organizations with Adaptivity that fits”. Many organizations struggle to adopt agile in a way that delivers on its promise to make the company fast, flexible and efficient. Alexey and Roland created a model called Adaptivity Fit, that helps you to create a map to guide your agile transformational journey.

Boris Glogger is in the Agile and Scrum space almost forever. I was in his Scrum class many years ago and I still remember it. During the conference, he will share his experience with us presenting his keynote “Let’s do it again – the role of agile consulting for a sustainable world”.

Evan Leybourn will explore “The Shape of Agility” and what it takes to build the organization ready for no matter what the future brings. Evan is the co-founder of Business Agility Institute which has the best collection of curated content about business agility.

Pat Guariglia will talk about “Quiet Resistance | An understated force”. Change is hard. Transforming to an agile mindset, environment, and way of working is always challenging. Could agile transformations be challenged with something more basic and fundamental, something more core to human behavior? The success of agile depends so much on social interaction and collaboration.

Richard Cheng and Karim Harbott will close the conference with “What is Business Agility and Why It’s Important”. Richard and Karim explore why business agility is critical for our teams, organizations, and leaders and why they need to understand the concept and values around Business Agility.

And together with them, we are bringing over 30 awesome speakers from all around the world.

Join us at Agile Prague Conference Sep 19-20,2022 agileprague.com.

5 Reasons Why to Attend AgilePrague Conference 2019

#1: World-class Program

Several years in a row we managed to achieve high-quality program while keeping it affordable to the people in the Czech Republic. This year you can be looking forward to awesome speakers, for example, Samantha Laing, Pete Behrens, Heidi Helfand, Stephen Parry, and Marsha Shenk. Register soon, the conference is always sold out.

#2: Agile Journey Focus

The theme of this year is the Agile Journey. Agile is more than an IT process. We are going to talk about Agile transformations, leadership, scaling, the new ways of running your products and businesses, collaborative culture and great teams. See the program.

#3: Coaches Clinic

You can discuss any area you are interested in and get free help from experienced coaches at our Coaches Clinic. It is a unique and free service designed to help you with specific challenges you’ve encountered on your way to a more Agile way of working. The Coaches Clinic is prepared and organized by Certified Agile Coaches – Certified Team Coaches (CTC), Certified Enterprise Coaches (CEC), Certified Scrum Trainers (CST) and other experienced Agile coaches.

#4: Open Space

AgilePrague Conference is not just about listening. We want you to participate and come up with your own session. Every mid-day there is an open space where you have an opportunity to share ideas, discuss topics with each other and join a deep dive conversation with our speakers. Open space is an opportunity to create your own program and bring your own topics to the conference.

#5: Visit Prague

Prague is an awesome city, so why not combine the sightseeing & conference? Have a beer, wander through old town & narrow streets, enjoy one of the greatest historical cities 🙂

Looking forward to seeing you on Sep 16-17, 2019 at AgilePrague Conference!

5 reasons why to attend AgilePrague Conference 2018

#1: World-class Program
Several years in a row we managed to achieve high-quality program while keeping it affordable to the people in the Czech Republic. This year you can be looking forward to awesome speakers – for example: David Hussman, Roman Pichler, Evan Leybourn, Marsha Shenk, Yves Hanoulle and many more.

#2: Business Agility Focus
The theme for this year is Business Agility. Agile is more than an IT process. We are going to talk about Agile transformations, scaling, the new ways of running your products and businesses, Agile Leadership, collaborative culture and great teams.

#3: Coaches’ Clinic
You can discuss any area you are interested in and get free help from experienced coaches at our Coaches’ Clinic. It is a unique and free service designed to help you with specific challenges you’ve encountered on your way to a more Agile way of working.

#4: Open Space
AgilePrague Conference is not just about listening. We want you to participate and come up with your own session. Every mid-day there is an open space where you have an opportunity to share ideas, discuss topics with each other and join a deep dive conversation with our speakers. Open space is an opportunity to create your own program and bring your own topics to the conference.

#5: Visit Prague
Prague is an awesome city, so why not combine the sightseeing & conference? Have a beer, wonder though old town & narrow streets, enjoy one of the greatest historical cities 🙂

Looking forward to seeing you on Sep 10-11, 2018 at AgilePrague Conference! Register for Agile Prague 2018.

Agile Prague Conference

Agile Prague Conference, which I organize in Prague every year, has already been here for 6 years. We are sold-out again (the only way how to get to Agile Prague 2016 is to attend LeSS workshop). This time we were already sold-out one month before the event, which is going to be 12-13 Sep 2016 this year. But don’t worry. We don’t want to make it bigger next year. Our mission is to offer the best of the best speakers with hands on experience on Agile, Scrum, Kanban, XP practices, but also share experiences from leaders of Agile organizations with their transformation, Scaling, etc. We don’t want to grow, as the biggest part of the conference learning is hidden in conversation you can have with other participants and our creative thinkers – the speakers. In order to make it possible, we can’t be too big. I’m attending several huge events every year (Agile 20xx with over 2500 participants and Global Scrum Gatherings with over 1200) and compare the learning and experience I got there with small local events I’ve been speaking at (Big Apple Scrum Day (NYC), Scan-Agile, AgileSlovenia, ACE, … ). I like the smaller events better. It’s compact, easier to approach speakers, easier to reach into people again and build on top of the conversation we started before we all run to another session.

Every year we try to attract the best international speakers and bring their ideas and experiences to the Czech Republic. We are small country so it is very unique opportunity for our local Agile community to look at Agile in wider context. As the program is high quality and our conference is getting great references from past year audience and speakers, we attract more and more participants from Europe and other countries.

So if you’ve never been to Prague you can already mark the next year date into your calendars – it’s going to be Sep 11-12, 2017. We do our best to attract wonderful speakers for you again. If you are a speaker and you or your family never got a time to go for holiday to Prague, submit your talk next year and we give you awesome opportunity to combine conference and sightseeing all together. We offer a private guide to our speakers and their families (so they have a program with us while you are at the conference). You will not only have an opportunity to speak at one of the best Central European events but also can enjoy history, and local atmosphere with us.

Looking forward to see you this year at Agile Prague Conference, and hope to see you next year again.

Global Scrum Gathering® Prague 2015

I’ve got a unique opportunity to be co-chair of the global Scrum Gathering Prague. It’s an event for all Agile and Scrum enthusiasts around the globe – the European Gathering usually got around 600 people.

The theme was structured around the five senses to challenge agile mindset and support the Scrum Alliance’s goal of “Transforming the World of Work”. The unofficial theme was how to address complexity and how companies need to change in order to address such change and sustain the market expectations.

I especially enjoyed the opening keynote from Niels Pflaeging (if you are looking for a keynote, he is definitely part of my top#10 suggestions). He’s been talking about change in the management over past few decades. He explained that Taylorism is dead. That traditional management is not applicable for current extremely dynamic and global world. The world, which is not complicated, as it used to be, but it is complex and brings us surprises every day. You can’t respond by new process or standardization. It changes so fast so it’s not possible anymore. To answer complexity you have to use new tools like System Thinking or Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching.

Another surprise was lightning talks. They’ve been selected by audience using dot voting (very agile way, huh?) during the first day and they’ve been all great. Add finally I very much enjoyed Pecha Kucha format. If you never seen it it’s 20 slides auto forwarding after 20 seconds. Very nice format. Enjoyable. It forces speakers to speak to the subject and keep rhythm. And/but you have to be great speaker to make it.

The last day we’ve got an openspace. It’s always full of people, and engaging, but this time I was very much amazed by how many people attended Stuart’s illustration session. He’s been running a workshop on drawing and visual facilitation techniques and he’s got more than 150 people at this openspace session. If you missed it, don’t worry we are going to invite Stuart to Agile Prague Conference 12-13Sep 2016 so you have second chance :).

Agile Prague Conference 2015

Agile Prague Conference 2015 – Sep 14-15, 2015 got awesome speakers for this year. We were able to get unique experts from all different areas of Agile and Scrum. We have talks on Agile Product Management, Scaling Scrum, DevOps, Test Driven Development – TDD, Behavior Driven Development – BDD, change and improvements.

This year we continue with 2 full conference days – every day we plan for 2 parallel tracks and one additional workshop/game/open space track in the afternoons at open area.

So far you can be looking forward to the following keynote speakers:

– Jurgen Appelo | selected by Inc. “100 Great Leadership Speakers for Your Next Conference”

– David Hussman | author of the Dude’s Law

– Joshua Kerievsky | protect people by engineering anzen (“safety” in Japanese) into workspaces and code bases

– Bas Vodde | creator of Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a framework for scaling agile development

and talks from:

– Vasco Duarte | improving estimates for software with #NoEstimates

– Andrea Provaglio | speaking at AgilePrague for the 5th time

– Jutta Eckstein | enabling Agile development on the organizational level

– Senta Jakobsen | enables distributed development

– Cliff Hazell | at Spotify we aim to build shared views and models to reduce unnecessary ambiguity

– Oded Tamir | DevOps is taking the Agile to the next level

– Pawel Brodzinski | the missing bit is almost never a tool or a method but sort of myth
and that’s indeed not all.

Those wonderful speakers are just beginning of our list. In addition you can be looking forward to games, workshops, case-studies, and last but not least an Open Jam session – believe it or not, for most of conference attendees the open space is the most valuable part of every conference. How it works? Bring your idea/question/theme to discuss and run a session yourselves. Or join any group where you are interested in the subject and share your experiences and hints. Or just listen. It’s an awesome opportunity to get insights from each other.

Looking forward? Have a look to Agile Prague Conference web site, full program and register now!

Agile Prague Conference 2014

It’s time to invite you to the 4th year of Agile Prague Conference. . It is in September and we have wonderful speakers this year. You can have a look at the full program, but if it’s too long to read it through, here is my personal recommendation:

Linda Rising is the person I like; no matter what the topic is it’s always one of the best talks. This time she starts a conference with a keynote The Power of the Agile Mindset.
Are you bored or struggling with estimates? Then Vasco Duarte will share with you his thoughts about #NoEstimates.

This year we have several speakers talking about scaling Agile and Scrum. One of the keynotes are from Dean Leffingwell and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

We have speakers talking about Agile Architecture, Kevlin Henney is having a pre-conference tutorial on that topic. We have several speakers sharing their experiences about development, testing and practical case-studies.

And last but not least, we have several short workshops in the afternoons, for example my workshop – Coaching starter for Scrum Masters, a networking party where you can discuss and meet other people and an open jam session where you can share ideas.

See more details about speakers and talks.