An Agile20XX Conference needs to be seen to be believed – it’s an amazing conference where people from all over the world come together to discuss the latest in all things Agile. This is your chance to become a part of the experience by submitting a talk or workshop for Agile2023. Read on to find out more about Agile2023 and discover why it is an event not to be missed!
Agile2023 Tracks
July 24-28, 2023 | Orlando, Florida
Program Information for Agile 2023
We are here for the community!
Agile Alliance was founded by and thrives by virtue of its community. The Agile20XX annual conference has been the primary mechanism for bringing that community together year after year to expand and promote Agile values and principles, regardless of which Agile framework you follow (or you don’t follow a framework at all).
Protecting the health and well-being of our community is of paramount importance to Agile Alliance. With COVID-19 being an ongoing concern, we are taking every practical step to make the conference safe for all participants–attendees, speakers, and staff will be required to follow health protocols so that we can enjoy being together safely.
Agile2023 Presentation Types
75-Minute Talks & Workshops
Engaging, dynamic, and thought-provoking sessions leave you with tips and tricks to try, questions to explore, and ideas to challenge. These will be 75-minute sessions in both talk and workshop formats.
3-Hour Deep Dive Workshops
These workshops are designed to allow you to explore and experience a topic in greater depth. They are activity-based sessions where attendees learn together through a series of facilitated exercises guided by the presenter(s).
30-Minute Talks
For Agile2023 we are going to experiment with a small number (up to 6) 30-minute talks, to enable smaller soundbites of information.
What else?
There will be a multitude of activities to complement the sessions, from Open Jam, Keynotes, Agile Advice, Lightning Talks, multiple networking opportunities, and lots more. We are so excited to have the chance to meet and interact with everyone at the event. So bring your thoughts, openness, and energy.
Sustainability
For Agile2023, we are putting a focus on sustainability. We have a specific interest in submissions that apply a sustainability lens to ANY topic, showing how people, organizations, and technology can embed sustainability into their thoughts and actions too. If your submission aligns with this please, add the keyword sustainability to your submission.
Lightning Talks
Wanting to share your thoughts in a shorter fast-paced session? Have some ideas you want to try out and get some feedback on?
It’s time to propose a Lightning Talk
The purpose of the Lightning Talk Track is to provide a lightweight, flexible opportunity for speakers to share valuable information with participants. Presentations are short with one of the following formats:
- 3-minute Lightning Talk (no slides)
- 5-minute Lightning Talk (slides)
- 7-minute Pecha Kucha style presentation
The themes of lightning talks will follow these themes: Energizing People and Teams, Enriching Organizations, Accelerating Products, Technology for all, Career Stories, and Other. These sessions provide an opportunity for rapid and diverse learning on a variety of topics.
Submission Timeline
- Lightning Talks may be submitted from April 4th, 2023 through to June 4th, 2023
- Voting on Lightning Talks will be open from June 5th, 2023 through June 19th, 2023
- Approved submitters will be notified by June 26th, 2023
Agile Essentials
Just entering the wonderful world of Agile, or looking to dip your toe into new aspects of Agility?
Look out for Agile Essentials
For those who are new to Agile and/or to this conference community, Agile Essentials sessions in the first few days of the event will provide a brief, systematic overview of the roles, mindset, concepts, terminology, and essential practices you need as a foundation for your agile journey. We’ll cover how these themes play out across a wide range of common frameworks, so whether your organization has committed to a particular approach (or several) or you’re just starting to evaluate all the options, you’ll find content that directly addresses the ways agile shows up for you.
These sessions should help you feel more grounded in core agile principles and practices, and better prepared to embark on one or more learning pathways through the rest of the conference. At the conclusion of each session, we’ll provide specific recommendations for related sessions, as well as opportunities to get advice on your unique circumstances.
Open Space
Passionate about helping improve your organization? Learning to see yourself as a leader so you can help others?
Thursday Open Space is the place to be!
Open Space is an amazing framework that gives everyone (including you) the opportunity to create a new menu of conference sessions to:
- fill in gaps from other sessions and integrate learnings from the week,
- dig deeper into topics you are interested in with others who have similar interests,
- explore a topic that was not on the program,
- meet and connect with attendees who you would not have otherwise met.
Whether you are new to open space or have experienced a great one, join us! We will explain the structure so that you (and everyone else) can create and learn from amazing sessions and content!
Agile Advice
Need some Agile Advice, or want to help others?
Agile Advice is a dedicated area that enables conference attendees (Advice-Seekers) to have a one-on-one conversation with an experienced Agilist (Advisor) to help with questions or issues that the attendee may have.
The Agile Advice team coordinates a set of trusted, experienced Advisors to volunteer availability during designated Advice hours. Advice-Seekers sign up for an appointment time and include a brief description of the topics they are hoping to discuss.
The Agile Advice team then pairs each Advice-Seeker during an appointment block with the Advisor that can best support the needs at hand. The Advisor and Advice-Seeker then have a semi-private space available to have their conversation.
After completing their session, the Advice-Seeker is encouraged to leave feedback about their experience. Over the years we have used this valuable feedback to improve the experience for everyone involved.
The Audacious Salon
Want to dive into some topics in more depth? Want to learn techniques for handling those constructive conflict or debate situations?
Check out Audacious Salon track
The Audacious Salon at Agile2023 is exactly what you might imagine such an audacious name to be: An invitation to participate in dialogue and discussion of the most adventurous, bold, and daring topics one might find at the conference. This year’s edition of the Audacious Salon takes aim at four intriguing themes which challenge our closely held norms, beliefs, and assumptions:
- What “necessary evils” must we continue to support and grow in our mission of agility throughout our organizations? Let’s explore sticky subjects like…
Frameworks, Certifications, Scaling, and enterprise-size systems
- How does “Agile coaching” need to evolve to be a greater benefit to organizations? Agile coaches often have more experience telling others how to do things, than doing them themselves. What if Management is really where “Agile coaching” should be? Can coaches cause change w/o explicit authority?
- Is Agile the solution to all that ails a business? We sure seem to use Agile for a lot of problems. What might help companies improve results more than Agile today? What can we learn from Queuing systems and flow, “The Covid era” and remote working, Organizational design and development, and Management as a “service” (to people)
- It seems like every year companies push for troublesome practices like “performance management”, metrics and measurements, accountability, etc. How can we finally realize these things in a healthy, productive way?
Performance management, Accountability, Measurement and metrics, and more!
Featuring a “daily debate” and multiple group-dialog-focused sessions throughout the week, the Audacious Salon is the place for the wisdom of the entire conference to emerge! Despite its audacious nature, the Salon is carefully designed for inclusion and participation and is a safe place to discuss beliefs.
You’re all invited to bring your wisdom and insights to the Audacious Salon at Agile 2023 and help create a world of work that is inclusive, flexible, and innovative. Come join the discussion!
The Agile Alliance Lounge
Interested in meeting the Agile Alliance Board? Want to hear more about how you can get involved with community initiatives?
The Agile Alliance Lounge (in the Citrus Ballroom) is the place to find out the answers to these questions and so many more. Learn from the people in Agile Alliance who are creating coaching ethics, translating the Agile manifesto, supporting meet-ups and coach camps, and have great future plans to do more. There will also be fun games and activities! This is a place where everyone is welcome.
From tracks to playlists
We continue the reduced number of tracks established last year to simplify the submission process, with a wonderful addition; Technology for All; once the content has been confirmed, we will create “playlists” to group content by themes.
We hope this information is useful to you and we can’t wait to see you in July!
Accelerating Products Track
Program Chair: Emma Armstrong
Track Chair: Christina Hartikainen
Welcome to the Accelerating Products track!
On this track, we will explore Agile and Agile-adjacent ways of designing, developing, and caring for great products. Whether your product is a physical piece of equipment, a piece of software, a service, a marketing package, or something else, we want to hear your story.
While the term Accelerating Products might feel one-dimensional it covers a plethora of different disciplines such as:
- Discovering practices to help the work flow faster, smoother, and better during delivery
- Learning and leading how to make products more inclusive and accessible
- Building sustainability into every step of the journey
- Accelerating product adoption through marketing and sales
Do you have a story to tell, a novel practice that changed your world, or perhaps a journey you made towards a more sustainable product for a better world? If you do then we really want to hear about them, welcome to your home, Accelerating Products!
Enriching Organizations Track
Program Chair: Chris Murman
Track Chair: Pradeepa Narayanaswamy
How often do you attend sessions, gain a wealth of knowledge, and then struggle with how to operationalize it within your organization across hundreds to thousands of individuals? The Enriching Organizations track provides sessions on everyday problem-solving and specific and actionable advice you can bring back for experimentation.
For this track, show us how your topic relates to the needs of organizations. This track will explore topics including, but not limited to:
- Systems thinking
- Portfolios, roadmaps, and planning
- Dependencies
- Organizational structures, team formation, matrixed reporting
- Career frameworks
- Budgeting
- Strategic goal-setting and tracking
- Business operations
- Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEBI) initiatives
- Organizational change and modernization
- …and, of course, anything and everything at scale
Our program themes overlap, so many potential topics will fit just fine in any track. You don’t need to overthink it! The track teams are working together to select the best submissions overall, so there is no advantage or disadvantage to your track choice. Pick one that fits well enough and we will take care of the rest.
Additional general guidelines to help you craft a successful proposal:
- Our audiences are mainly practitioners (technical, process, design), mid-level managers, and coaches, and successful proposals will be useful to one or more of those groups. Sessions addressed to the C-level or senior executives are less likely to be relevant.
- Yes, we will have room for a few forward-looking talks that imagine an ambitious future for agile… but much more of our program will be focused on everyday problem-solving for today’s practitioners. Not every submitter has to re-invent agility – if you have a simple, fresh approach to a common challenge, we want to hear about it!
- Experience reports and case studies focused on “here’s a cool thing we did” are less interesting on their own. We are looking for proposals that take the next step, providing specific actionable advice on how the audience can replicate their success or avoid their failure.
- Well-defined, concrete learning objectives, expressed with action verbs, are important: “attendees will be able to do,” rather than “attendees will learn/know/understand.” The Info for Program Team section should help the review team understand how the session will deliver those objectives.
Energizing People & Teams Track
Program Chair: Dana Pylayeva
Track Chair: Jenny Tarwater
Collaboration techniques and technologies are more sophisticated and creative than ever, giving us tools to bring ever richer and more diverse groups of humans together to solve the world’s wicked problems. After gathering those people into teams, how do we ignite their passion, tap into their collective brilliance and continuously foster their creative energy to amplify team performance?
As a community grounded in continuous improvement, we have constantly broadened our influences, expanded our knowledge, and borrowed from other disciplines to deepen our understanding and improve our ability to guide, support, lead, and do.
What have you learned lately? What have you tried? Whose influences have you brought to bear as you try to foster connection, collaboration, creativity, and inspiration? How have you and your teams found new ways to achieve together? How is your team—dev team to exec team to volunteer team—stronger than ever?
We want this track to educate and energize Agile2023 attendees with new ideas, new connections, new techniques, and new reasons to keep improving how we work together.
We expect this description to evolve as we learn more about the things that are interesting to us and the community at large.
Technology For All Track
Program Chair: Semira Allen
Track Chair: ‘Tine Zekis
We are status quo breakers, disability advocates, and technical evangelists creating space for innovation. So what if we could explore more ways technology can break barriers and engage in accessible solutions?
Tying into the extreme programming values of respect and courage Technology is a world of constant change. Therefore, we must continue to share and learn together as a community. Technology for All desires to improve the technical competency of the agile community as well as find a way to bridge the gap between the needs of business and IT leaders.
This track will be devoted to thinking beyond the tech of today and finding means of exploring the future we desire. Topics encouraged for this track include:
- Creating an avenue for people that are leveraging technological solutions to make an impact on their community.
- Transforming workspaces into accessible collaboration environments for all of our colleagues.
- Breaking tech barriers to create smarter cities.
- Removing the barriers of entry for those in various roles, industries, or diverse people groups.
We are looking for people to share all the ideas, topics, conversations, and learnings in this space to help others make technology transformational for people, processes, cultures, and worlds.