This leadership event has Agile insights and live jazz

Have you ever wished that your business could be productive? That your next business conference wasn’t the same as all of the others you could remember? Or even that you could skip a business conference to go to the theater, or a jazz concert?

AgileCxO might have the answer. The R&D org is hosting a Leadership Summit on Friday September 22, to provide insights for business leaders who may have some experience utilizing Agile leadership. The firm is also teaming with local organizations Broadsword and Sylver Rain as sponsors for the summit.

According to Broadsword Director of Marketing and Communications Rob MacDonald, Agile leadership presents a different approach to delivering products. One example is the way it measures results.

Conventional projects tend to measure completeness based on the number of hours that the project is estimated to take rather than the quality of work that is done in that amount of time, said Jeff Dalton, president and lead appraiser at Broadsword. In the Agile framework, a project’s timeframe and cost is set, but the project’s true success is determined by the customer based on the quality of the product that is delivered within those hours.

A non-Agile coder, for instance, could write pages and pages of code to solve a problem, but the better worker might actually be a coder who produces relatively little coding length-wise in the same amount of time, but manages to come up with an insightful solution to the problem and execute it quickly.

The afternoon event is aimed at Agile users who have used the strategy before, but are looking for more ways to implement it. The summit will open with a lunch and networking period followed by a series of talks, which include two keynote speakers and a set of lightning talks by business leaders. Broadsword Director of Strategic Solutions Tim Zeller is giving one of the lightning talks.

The planning team purposely chose the rather non-traditional venue at Mead Center for American Theater because they envision the talks unfolding like acts in rapid succession to create a new “business theater” model. The jazz musicians that will play as part of the summit will also use the same cooperation strategy as will be taught through the keynotes and lectures in the summit.

True to the Agile model, Dalton promises to pack more valuable lessons into a short afternoon, rather than having an extended business-conference model.