Thanks for the reminder, Ravi. Slides now added.
There seems to be a lot of material that you are trying to cover which can be reduced significantly. My suggestion for ex. is to pick 2-3 most important people related aspects and articulate the role of the procees or tools in overcoming the challenges that helped the offshore/distributed teams. This in my opinion would be very valuable for the audience. Honesly 90 min for a talk will be overwhelming. Alternatively you could also consider to split the topics into two 20 min experience reports one on tools and the other on people & process.
Thank you for the feedback, Ravi. I do appreciate the concern about the amount of material to cover. My thought was that there may be value in a session on this topic that focusses on the breadth of the topic instead of depth of a few items so that it can help people setting up distributed teams to identify all the types of things they need to think about. In my experience with managing and coaching large (often ultra-distributed) teams, I've seen teams focus on some aspects of how to execute as a distributed team and even do those very well. But often they miss out on other key aspects leading to less than stellar results. Hence my hypothesis that coverage of breadth may be useful here. Choosing 2-3 items to focus on would also be a valid option here, but wouldn't match my intent. I fully understand that I would have to be very, very selective about how much I can share on each of the sub-topics, and thats what I intend to do.
I'm also with you on 90min possibly being too long for a monologue-type talk, so I'm open to shortening this to 60 min, and perhaps cutting out the 'Tools' section altogether, substituting it with a handout perhaps. In addition I would shorten the 'People' and 'Process' sections to 25 min each, leaving 10 min for Q&A. Would that work better?
The designated time slots as per the program structure is 20, 60 and 90 min slots. it will be essential to have the sessions aligned to slots. I suggest you to do the following.
1. Revisit your proposal and update it for the shorter time duration.
2. Submit a draft of the session in a ppt so that we get a better perspective on your session.
We might be able to adjust the time slots if the content justifies the 60 min time requirement.
Thanks Ravi. I have updated the proposal for a 45 min slot. I've cut out a few of the lower priority sub-topics to fit within the smaller window and eliminated a separate Q&A time at the end - we'll just take questions as we go along.
As for ppt - I don't have a ready one I can send you just yet. Chirag and I usually prefer to keep our slides very light on text (probably not much more than what we've included in the outline), focussing on visuals to represent the ideas we talk about. It will be a few days before we can have these visuals ready.
In addition to the comments by Raja and Rahul, I have an observation. You have listed about 12 areas across People, Process and Tools. Some of these are quite large by themselves and doing all these in 90 minutes may not do justice to the individual topics.
Do you think it would make sense to have a focussed session on 2-3 topics which feel are at the top of your mind when you set up distributed Agile teams.
The focus of my talk is on breadth, so you're right that I won't be able to spend a lot of time on each individual sub-topic. There is reasonably rich material available on many of them, that I will reference as further reading material during my talk for anyone who wants to go into depth. This is a vast area, but based on my experience with this topic, I specifically wanted to attempt a quick run-through of all major area to consider when setting up a distributed team, because I find that one or the other critical areas are missed or ignored by a lot of project teams (I'm guilty of it myself) that puts to waste a lot of hard work put in other areas of project setup. This talk is also based on the outline of a book on distributed delivery that a colleague and I are working on.
This proposal is for a talk. Just be looking at the proposal, I wonder if the duration (90 minutes) is too short or too long because I am not sure if you are going to cover a wide range of possible varieties of projects. More details in terms of bringing out the focus areas, takeaways, benefits etc., will help. Also, structiring the process with more items or sub-items will improve clarity.
Could you please add these to your proposal? That is going to help our reviewers understand what you are going to cover and how you are going to structure this talk.
Thank you for the comments. I do have a lot of material to present so 90 min possibly being too short is a valid concern. The idea here is to focus on the breadth of the topic, such that participants know what the areas to think about when setting up a distributed team. They will of course then need to read other reference material on sub-topics for depth. I'm adding some more to the outline and learning outcomes, as well as providing links to videos and slides of other talks I've given (incl at previous editions of the agile india conference). I have not presented this particular session before so I don't have slides or videos to link to.
Adding more sub-items to the structure as you've suggested.
Thank you for submitting the proposal.
In your proposal, I would like to understand what you will present in each section, and more detail in the learning outcome section. If you have a presentaiton / outline / narrative /past video / any other reference material, it would be helpful if you could share that as well and update the proposal with the relevant info.
I have presented different portions of this material at a number of client locations as part of my job as a consultant and coach at ThoughtWorks (e.g. on communication patterns, team configuration models, etc in distributed scenarios) but this is an attempt to compile all of this into one presentation for the first time, so I don't have a ready deck or video. I'm adding more details to the outline and learning outcomes for further clarity on the content I intend to present.