Impressions from the first day of GOTO Copenhagen 2016

I have just returned home after spending the whole day at GOTO Copenhagen 2016, listening to great speakers talking about software development.

As I wrote in my last post on GOTO Copenhagen, I had planned to spend the day watching the Effective Delivery track, and this is what I did.

For someone like me, who works with projects in the public sector, this was a fantastic track.

The first talk was Tony Grout's Hand to hand with a gorilla won't work, about how you introduce agile in a very large organization.

Basically, it takes a lot of effort, and some cunning, and it won't be pure, but as Grout said, "good luck with pure". Sometimes you have to be pragmatic in order to reach your goal.

One interesting thing that Grout said, was that a fairly simple, yet very effective tool, is an ordered list across the organization, allowing everyone to know what they should focus on first. Introducing such a list in Skype, increased the productivity ten-fold.

Next up was Jez Humble's When DevOps Meets Regulations: Integrating 'Continuous' with 'Government'

This talk was about the efforts of introducing DevOps in government projects in the US. A big barrier to this are the regulations they have to follow when making "information systems".

A partial list of regulations that @jezhumble have to remember when launching government system in the US. Seems similar to Denmark #gotocph pic.twitter.com/DZxepcDubP

— Kristjan Wager (@kriswager) October 3, 2016

As I write in my tweet, the list doesn't seem overly long to me, compared to what we experience in Denmark. As the talk progressed, however, I realized that the US process for fulfillment is much more cumbersome than the Danish one, and it definitely needs an overhaul.

One cool thing that Jez Humble introduced us for, is an open source cloud platform for government projects in the US. This seems like a great idea, and I'd love to see something similar in Denmark.

After the US, the turn came to the UK, in the form of Stephen Forshew-Cain's Building an effective delivery culture, where he talked about the Digital Service and its culture.

I am planning on writing a longer blogpost about Jez Humble's and Stephen Forshew-Cain's talks and how they relate to the Danish situation, so I won't go further into the talk here.

Having spent some time on government projects, the time came for talking about effective teams - this came in the form of Camille Fournier's Building a High-Performance Team is Everyone's Job. This was the title in the program, but she had given it a different name at the time of the talk (the title is unfortunately on a photo in my phone which has run out of power).

I had never heard Camille Fournier speak before, but I will most certainly do so again, if I ever get the chance.

It was a very amusing, and highly informative talk, where she spoke about her experiences, and what she had learned from them, when it came to leadership.

"I came from finance where it was OK to yell at people. Apparently that's not the case everywhere" @skamille on early mistakes #gotocph

— Kristjan Wager (@kriswager) October 3, 2016

last, but not least, on the track, Emily Webber gave her talk Communities of practice, the missing piece of your agile organisation, in which she talked about how to create communities of practice inside your organisation.

All of the talks were great, and I certainly got a lot out of them. Hopefully the same will be the case tomorrow, when I spend my time at the Tactics for better Teams track.