Call us today if you have questions, at the number below.
Or, drop us an email at:
Email:
Phone:
(203) 234 1404
Get on the Agile/CT mailing list …..to stay notified of Agile news and events in Connecticut.
About Dan Mezick
Thank you for your attention !!
Follow Dan on twitter (@DanMezick)
Send Dan an email at dan.mezick [at] newtechusa[dot][com].
Dan Mezick, up closer.
The following is some background information on Dan Mezick:
Associations & Certifications
Member, Scrum Alliance. Certified Scrum Master (CSP). See Dan Mezick’s Scrum Alliance profile here
Member, Agile Alliance. See Dan Mezick’s Agile Alliance profile (circa 2009) here.
Member, Agile Project Leader’s Network.
Member, Project Management Institute. Active in the MassBay chapter and Southern CT chapter. Serving (in 2009) as a Programs committee member, authorized to identify and engage speakers for SNEC-PMI’s monthly meetings. (see www.snec-pmi.org)
Member, USA Hockey. Certified Level 3 Hockey Coach. (See also: PCT Framework, under Personal Interests section below)
Agile Conference sessions
Agile2009 session: BART Analysis Applied (Boundary, Authority Role and Task)
Agile2009 session: Group Relations and Social Systems
Agile2008 session: The Hidden Life of Groups
Agile2007 session: Agile and Entreprenuerial Thinking Patterns. Here is a link to the Agile training grades from Agile2007. People seemed to like this session.
Agile Community Volunteer Work
Organizer, Agile Boston user group, since 2007
Organizer, Agile CT user group, since 2007
[Manifesting Agility] Stage producer, Agile Alliance Agile2009 Conference, 2009
Published Books, Articles and Papers
Article: May 11 2009, Agile Journal: Scrum and SVO-p (Subject-verb-object, present tense)
Article: August 18 2003, COMPUTERWORLD: Outsourcing 2.0: Collaborative Development
Book: April 1999, Visual Basic BOOTCAMP Certification Exam Guide, McGraw Hill
Blog Posts and Other Written Works
Post: April 22 2009: Entrainment, a key to how Scrum works
Post: April 15 2009: Attraction and Repulsion: Scrums Immune System
Post: April 27 2009: BART: Boundary, Authority Role & Task as Related to Scrum
Post: August 11 2007: Inattentional Blindness: an Obstacle to Agile
Web article: May 11 2009: MegaScrum: A Scrum Structure for Massively Distributed, non-IT, All-Volunteer Efforts
Web article: April 2001: Enter Late and Dominate: Mezick’s Theorem of Open Source
…..Web article Addendum: Mezick’s Theorem Addendum page
…..Web article Summary: Responses Around the Web to the Theorem, plus Q&A
…..Interesting responses: Quick Google list of “here and now” responses around the web
Patents Awarded; Other Achievements
Patent: Property setting manager for objects and controls of a graphical user interface
Patent number: 5872974
Filing date: Apr 19, 1995
Issue date: Feb 16, 1999
Business Entreprenuership Award: Deliotte and Touche FAST50 Award for 2002. Recognized again for leading one of the top 50 fastest growing technology firms in the state of Connecticut for calendar year 2002.
Business Entreprenuership Award: Deliotte and Touche FAST50 Award for 2001. Recognized for the 1st time for leading one of the top 50 fastest growing technology firms in the state of Connecticut for calendar year 2001.
Personal Interests and Projects
The Parent-Coach Timeout Meeting: A Framework for Effective Communication in Youth Sports. Essential Scrum and Group Relations concepts applied to youth sports.
The PCT is a framework that allows Coaches and Parents to communicate clearly, such that Parents, Coaches and Kids can a) learn from experience during the season, b) make adjustments, and c) have much more FUN in pursuit of shared objectives.
Openness, Focus, Commitment, Respect and Courage are Scrum values.The PCT process is essentially Scrum, adapted to youth sports….and is especially focused on youth hockey.
Follow me on twitter (@DanMezick)
Send me an email at dan.mezick [at] newtechusa[dot][com].
Driving Directions to Agile Connecticut Meetings
REGISTER for the NEXT, UPCOMING Meeting
Microsoft Corporation
74 Batterson Park Road
Farmington, CT 06032
PHONE: 860- 678 – 3100
Directions traveling from 84 West (from Hartford)
Exit 37 (Fienemann Rd.), Right off ramp.
At next set of lights take a left onto Batterson Park Road.
Continue on Batterson, you’ll pass Bank of America on your left.
After Bank of America, you will see Pond View Corporate Center 74-78. Take a left and head up the driveway bearing right at the fork.
Take a left into the parking lot.
Microsoft is located at 74 Batterson Park Road, building on the left.
Directions from 84 East (from Waterbury)
Exit 37 (Fienemann Rd.)
At end of ramp, go straight through lights onto Batterson Park Road.
Continue on Batterson, you’ll pass Bank of America on your left.
After Bank of America, you will see Pond View Corporate Center 74-78. Take a left and head up the driveway bearing right at the fork.
Take a left into the parking lot.
Microsoft is located at 74 Batterson Park Road, building on the left.
Directions from 91 South(from Springfield and points North)
From 91 South, take exit 32B to 84 West. Follow directions from 84West above.
MAP:
Google Map
Good Agile and Scrum links from all around the Web
NOTE:
if you ever get to Boston from time to time, be sure to check out our OTHER, Boston-based user group, Agile Boston
Introductory Links
Intermediate-Level Links
Chickens and Pigs– harsh or helpful? From Jeff Sutherland
THE NOKIA TEST VIDEO WITH DR. JEFF SUTHERLAND. NOTE: There is an update coming for this topic; I learned alot at the Agile2008 conference from folks like Kati Vilkii, COO of Business Excellence at Nokia Seimens Networks. Updates to follow….
Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) Scrum Log
The Scrum Papers: The Evolution of Scrum since 1993 from Jeff Sutherland.
Takeuchi and Nonaka are Godfathers of the Scrum Agile Process since they coined the term in their seminal paper in the Harvard Business Review in 1986.
Link to updated works and original paper that kicked off Scrum: This is a foundational work and important reading for Scrum scholars. TITLE: The New New Product Development Game, Harvard Business Review, 1986
Concept of Ba: “the space” — Nonaka is one of the original authors of the Harvard Business Review article “The New New Product Development Game” which influenced the development of Scrum. This is another co-authored article by Nonaka on the concept of ‘ba’ and knowledge creation. It is interesting.
Group Dynamics Links
Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing: Now THAT’s a saying you run into quite a bit in Agile circles. Here is the original research paper from the 1960’s, upon which that trendy saying is based: Developmental Sequence in Small Groups by Bruce Tuckman
About the Connecticut Chapter of the Agile Project Leaders Network
We are Agile Connecticut, the CT Chapter of the APLN, a nationwide federation of users groups dedicated to promoting, spreading and enabling Agile software development practices worldwide.
Our history locally goes back to the summer of 2007 when we held our first meeting at the Marriot in Farmington CT.
Since then we have held a meeting almost every month.
We usually meet on the 1st Tuesday of the month, but be sure to check the Next Meeting page to be sure of the date and time.
We start monthly meetings promptly at 6PM and end at 8PM. (Lots of people hang and talk after 8PM, so plan on lingering if you want more informal networking time.)
Mission
The mission of APLN CONNECTICUT is to explore agile leadership in agile projects, agile product portfolios, and agile enterprises in the region. The Agile Project Leadership Network’s (APLN) overall mission is to connect, develop, and support great project and enterprise leaders using Agile methods nationwide.
Each meeting of the APLN CONNECTICUT Chapter is your chance to network with leading regional experts in the area of Agile Leadership, and to share your experiences and concerns with them and other leaders, who are in the same situation as yourself.
CONNECTICUT’s Chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network
Each meeting features a speaker and networking opportunities. APLN’s CONNECTICUT chapter targets both new and seasoned Agile leaders – both organizational leaders and project leaders, within IT and outside of IT. The group educates through a tutorial and networking focus. Members and other attendees discover, share, and develop tools and techniques for becoming great leaders in their organization.
APLN CONNECTICUT meets once a month, USUALLY on the FIRST Tuesday of the month. APLN CONNECTICUT provides:
- Networking opportunities at each meeting;
- Mini-seminars and experience reports on Agile Leadership: successes, failures, best practices, experiences, advanced leadership tools, and models
Each meeting also features an open forum, where participants raise issues and get answers in an open, peer-to-peer format.
Dan Mezick is the local Scrum Coach who organizes and runs the meetings.
Boston Area User Groups
Here is our list of local-area usergroups. Contact us to get your link added:
New England Visual Basic Pro User Group
Calendar of Boston area and regional UserGroup recurring schedules of meetings:
How to Become a Sponsor of Agile Boston
Sponsorship of our meetings gets your organization exposure in front of our members.
Agile Boston members are keenly interested in agile practices and are busy actually implementing Scrum and agile in the workplace.
A high percentage of the members have real decision-making authority in their IT organizations.
Typical meeting attendance is in the range of 80 to 100 members.
A representative from sponsor Rally Software, addressing a meeting.
Scrum and agile is beginning to cross over, and penetrate into non-IT projects and business decision-making. Scrum and agile are in fact emerging as highly effective management methods.
If you want to get in front of this audience, you can get involved immediately by taking up the role of Sponsor.
Benefits
1. Home Page Ad Banner. We provide direct home page position of your banner image and web page link. NOTE: The Agile Boston web is visited by over 2200 unique visitors per month, and this number is growing. You get immediate exposure as members visit the site for meeting details and logistics each month.
2. Direct Exposure at every Meeting. Only sponsors are authorized to display collateral at our meetings. Our average meeting is 70+ attending and we peak at about 145 which is the max that the room can hold. We provide you with a brief opportunity to explain your brand in front of the entire room at each meeting. During this time your logo is prominently displayed as the backdrop to your message.
3. Periodic Meeting’s FEATURED Sponsor. As an annual Sponsor, you get exposed to the membership at each and every meeting. We also provide you with the opportunity to make a small presentation at ONE meeting. This format is 5 minutes with 20 slides that each last 15 seconds each. Ignite is a very focused and compact format that allows you cram an enormous amount of content in your 5-minute talk. The Ignite format is required for delivering your 5 minutes as a Featured Sponsor of that meeting. Call to schedule.
4. SEO Link with your banner. The Agile Boston site has excellent Google ‘page rank’. This is a measure of web authority which Google assigns to a web site. We work with you to make sure the link from Agile Boston to your site results in SEO (search engine optimization) equity. This means the link actually moves you UP in Google’s search results. This helps you get found when anyone searches on phrases you intend to get found on via Google. NOTE: If your sponsorship expires, your banner is deleted and the other sponsors move up.
5. Email exposure. We send out least 3 emails a month in the form of meeting reminders etc. We include mention of your company, resulting in more recognition of your brand in the Boston community.
6. Dedicated, Exclusive, BRANDED marketing email. We send ONE email that announces one of your campaigns each year. We send it with other user-group news so it does look too commercial of sales-oriented. NOTE: We need at least 6 weeks notice to plan and execute this for you.
7. First notice of sponsorship opportunities for our larger events. We run larger events like:
We notify the current sponsors in ranked order, according to longevity of support. (Sponsors appear on the home page in ranked order.) This means that the sponsors with us the longest on a CONTINUOUS basis are notified FIRST about the opportunity to sponsor these events.
The crowd of 240++ at GIVE THANKS FOR SCRUM 11/25/2010
These larger events are always limited to “N” sponsors where N depends on the event. That means that when you sponsor one of these larger events you obtain a semi-exclusive marketing opportunity that leverages your investment of time and money.
Costs
We require an annual sponsorship that starts in January. if you come in during the year we pro-rate your cost and you re-up for a full year in January. Call for pricing.
Ground Rules
1. Banner ads are positioned according to current sponsor rank. Your banner is appended to the list of current sponsors. As old sponsors choose not to renew, they lose their place, and you move up.
2. You do not have exclusivity in your business domain area. For example, several Scrum trainers may choose to sponsor Agile Boston. We accomodate them. If you are willing to pay a premium to be the exclusive sponsor in a given business domain, contact us (below) to explore that in more detail.
Details:
Logo size: Please provide a logo that is 214 X 104 pixels in size, JPG format.
For emails: We send ONE email with just your marketing message and no other messaging from us or other sponsors. To enable this, you send us a WORD doc and we paste that into the email we send as HTML. To prepare, you format your message in WORD 2000 format and paste it into a FireFox email and send it to yourself… to be sure of how it looks. When you are satisfied with how it looks, you send the DOC to us with the date-of-send details, and we mail it for you.
Contact Us to discuss Agile Boston sponsorship opportunities.
Content: Previous Meetings of Agile Connecticut
Here are some highlights of the topics we have covered at previous events.
NOTE: As we present new topics in the monthly meeting, the detail migrates here for historical refererence.
October 06, 2009
Presentation: DAN MEZICK on GROUP RELATIONS AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS
These sessions provide tools for understanding and analysis of group-level learning and group-level cognition. The tools apply to groups and your participation in groups and group-level processes. Attend these talks if you have high interest in groups, group dynamics, and the actual mechanics behind self-organizing agile teams.
September 29, 630PM to 830PM
ANDY SINGLETON ON: REAL DISTRIBUTED SCRUM AND AGILE
Andy has over ten thousand hours logged as a developer and manager of distributed agile development projects. He brings this depth of experience to us in his presentation, revealing what works– and what doesn’t. He also reveals some surprising (perhaps even “shocking”) beliefs about Scrum, agile and high-performance distributed team team velocity.
August 7 2009
BOUNDARY, AUTHORITY, ROLE AND TASK: SCRUM’s SECRET SAUCE
Dan Mezick, CT-based Agile & Scrum Coach, Scrum Master, and speaker from Agile2007, Agile2008 and Agile2009, on:
July 07 2009: Michael de la Maza on AGILE GAMES
Michael de la Maza presents a great experiental session on learning Agile directly….via AGILE GAMES. This is a cool meeting !
Presentation: MICHAEL DE LA MAZA ON: LEARNING AGILE VIA AGILE GAMES
Learning Agile is about doing and experiencing. Books and lectures only take you so far– you have to experience some Agile activities to really get it. In this meeting we play games in teams, to learn specific Agile principles like inspect-and-adapt, fail-fast, determining highest-value activities, iterations, continuous improvement and so on.
SLIDES: Grab the slides HERE.
June 02 2009
Amr Elssamidisy, Agile book author and editor of Agile Journal, on:
EFFECTIVE AGILE ADOPTIONS:
October 6 2008:
Planning and Estimating, Part 2: Continuing from User Stories and Story Points, we do the deep dive on how to buffer interations, how to manage and estimate velocity, and how to continuously monitor and adjust Release planning. The problem with large Story Point size.
September 2 2008:
Part 1: Agile2008 Trip Report. HIghlights from the Annual Conference. A round-up of the most interesting sessions from the Toronto conference in August. At least 4 sessions are planned for summary presentation. We plan to pick those that represent the biggest trends in Agile and Scrum happening now.
Part 2: The Hidden Life of Groups. The session, as presented by Dan Mezick at Agile2008.
2008-08-12: The State of the Art in Scrum: Trip Report from “Scrum 201” in NYC **PLUS** Playing the XP Game. Summary of attendance experiences and content from Jeff Sutherland’s excellent advanced Scrum course, plus the XP game, a fun, group-level Agile training game.
2008 July: Planning and Estimating: A run-through of the key activities you must execute on to effectively plan and estimate within Agile projects. The conventional wisdom is that Agile and Scrum projects do very little planning. The truth is that on Scrunm projects, planning is a continuous best-practice. Agile practitioners do avoid PREDICTION and that was the focus of this presentation.
Agile, Empiricism and Entrepreneuers: The actual Agile2007 conference session from Dan Mezick, chair and organizer of the group. See the link to the Agile 2007 abstract here.
User Stories Demystified: A treatment of the User Story best practice, a format for collecting requirements. We covered User Stories structure, and size, and how to estimate Stories using Story Points.
Scrum as Attention Manager: Scrum absolutely does not discriminate in terms of dealing with distractions. All distractions are considered WASTE. In this session, we looked at Scrum’s attention-management mechanics and demonstrated how Scrum does an absolutely tremendous job of focusing on the work– at the expense of all kinds of distractions.
Trip Report: Agile2007: An formal rundown of presentations from the annual, international conference on Agile held each year. This report was from the 2007 Washington DC event.
June 01 Meeting: Joe Krebs of Incrementor on AGILE TRANSFORMATION at AOL (America OnLine).
(Meeting Venue: MICROSOFT FARMINGTON, 6:30PM)
MEETING VENUE: MICROSOFT FARMINGTON CT. REGISTER HERE for this meeting
DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT FARMINGTON.
TUESDAY June 01 2010, 630PM to 830PM
JOCHEN “JOE” KREBS on: AGILE TRANSFORMATION AT AOL, the Experience Report
Jochen (Joe) Krebs (http://www.jochenkrebs.com) is an Agile Coach and the founder of Incrementor (http://www.incrementor.com), a boutique consulting firm specialized in agile project and product management founded in 2005 and headquartered in NYC.
Joe focuses on enterprise transformation programs and has experience with initiatives planned both top-down or bottom-up. In 2008/2009 he transformed AOL from waterfall to agile project management with Scrum. This impacted the daily life of 3,000 employees around the globe.
Joe is the author of “Agile Portfolio Management”.
Joe founded and organizes the Agile NYC user group in New York City.
AGILE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT by Jochen Krebs
Experience Report: JOCHEN KREBS ON THE AGILE TRANSFORMATION AT AOL
May 2008 to October 2009……eighteen months that have changed how people work at AOL forever.
The introduction of Agile to AOL is one of the largest agile transformations ever in the agile industry. This adoption of agile and Scrum at AOL resulted in a huge success for the AOL enterprise and its employees.
The presenter personally coached the teams at AOL from May 2008 to October 2009.
In this session, Joe is planning to :
Share his experiences from this large-scale agile (Scrum) transformation;
Cover the time-line, strategy and motivations for the approach;
Explain how Scrum and other agile practices influenced quality, productivity and the morale of the teams.
Enumerate the detailed lessons learned from this agile journey and what opportunities and challenges lie ahead for AOL.
MEETING AGENDA:
6:30 PM: AGILE ORIENTATION: Some good stuff from Dan Mezick on Scrum
7:00 PM: Food and networking time
7:15 PM: MAIN EVENT: Experience Report from: Agile Coach Joe Krebs on Agile at AOL
8:25 PM: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF MEETING
MEETING VENUE: MICROSOFT FARMINGTON CT. REGISTER HERE for this meeting
DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT FARMINGTON.
NOTE: Please do not register casually. If you register, make a commitment to attend.
DO NOT register casually for this meeting, as you do us a big disservice to us by distorting the actual count for the seating and food. Registration is an explicit commitment to attend.
If you register and then, for some reason cannot attend, notify us by email. We need this info to execute on a good meeting. You help ALOT by a) registering with a real intent to attend and b) informing us if and when you cannot make it for some reason.
Please help us deliver a great meeting by complying with these simple ground rules.
MEETING VENUE: MICROSOFT FARMINGTON CT. REGISTER HERE for this meeting
Contacting Agile Connecticut- the Connecticut Chapter of the APLN
Call us today if you have questions, at the number below.
Or, drop us an email at:
Email:
Phone:
(203) 234 1404
(Get on the Agile/CT mailing list …..to stay notified of Agile news and events in Connecticut.)