Please find below the non technical sessions description

We would like to thank you for your willingness to be at MiXiT 2014 as you bought all 400 tickets in just 43 hours. As for the previous years, we know that we are going to have two energizing and collaborative days. As you know, in order to reinforce MiXiT diversity, the program (schedule here) is prepared by two different teams and finalised in a workshop with all the organisers. A first article was published a few weeks ago describing the technical sessions. You will find below an introduction to the agile, entrepreneurship and leadership sessions.

In the three years since MiXiT 2011, gamification sessions and effective workshops have become an asset to the conference. To extend its diversity, we have injected important knowledge domains, like user experience (UX), Lean Startup and architecture. 2014 explores more roads than 2013, but still aims at proposing “Ideas for Now”. The following description could have been a list of the sessions, but in order to give an overview, we split them in three parts:

TRUST, FLOW & DESIGN.

This group aims at helping participants to make their choices of the conference journey.

You can favourite the sessions that you like, by identifying yourself on our web site and clicking the star at the top right of a session.

###TRUST The best IT companies that emerged over the last decade have something in common: Trust. With trust inside your wall and with your customers, your organisation will work efficiently with a flat hierarchy and continuously improve itself. However, building and maintaining trust is difficult, and you need tools, good practices and skilled people.

Trust starts with colleagues and for those who begin with Agility at a team level, you will enjoy the feedback session from Anne-Sophie Tranchet & Olivier Servieres - FR - L’amélioration continue au sein d’une équipe agile

You need even more trust, with distributed teams. Alexis Monville will show us how the huge Openstack project faces these difficulties. FR -Des produits avec des équipes distribuées ? No trust could be built without communication between people. Unfortunately, the skills to work well with others -- from stakeholders, to users, to teammates -- isn't taught in school. Jeffrey Davidson with his session Consulting Secrets for Effective Communication will help us to improve ourselves in this aspect.

There are different ways to communicate and visualisation is one of the most effective. Yet visualisation is not about drawing, and we need to understand how our brain interprets visual information to master this discipline Mattias Skarin with his session, Visualization – what’s my brain got to do with it? will help us behave appropriately when visualizing.

Angel Medinilla - Drawing 101: Mastering the Stickman! workshop aims at enhancing your facilitation and coaching work with one of the most powerful tools for storytelling.

Games are also great for learning communication. Pierrick Thibault & Dorothée Le Seac'h with the game - Les Habits Neufs de l'Empereur will show us ways to communicate with others under stressful conditions.

Many IT people discover continuous improvement at team level based on the PDCA cycle and retrospective meetings. Now, how could we have continuous improvement at the organisation scale? Hakan will present the session Toyota Kata – habits for continuous improvements. Hakan Forss will take the Toyota Kata out of the manufacturing context and put it into our knowledge-work context.

To help your colleagues to improve themselves, the old model where thinkers plan and do-ers execute is obsolete. Even if you are not a expert in coaching, you can learn from them how to help others get better.

Matthew Philip - Coach like a wizard: Agile wisdom of Gandalf will talk about people empowerement and enabling them to fail safely.

and

in Deborah Preuss’ workshop - Basic Coaching Skills to Magnify Teamwork you will receive a new awareness of how to be a leader (even a peer-leader) and to impact a group's culture and process.

Culture Hacking is a way to tweak your company culture with small exercises or workshops that are not too disruptive or frustrating for people. Stefan & Jens will propose a workshop, Culture Hacking: How may we create more fun @work? where you learn practices to start moving your organisation towards a better future using interviewing practices.

###FLOW As Agile is mainstream today, most of us understand how important it is to make small batches of software and to validate their value & quality on the customer side.

Thanks to the DevOps movement for proposing good practices for the R&D and operation teams to flow batches to the end users. Arnaud Pflieger & Dimitri Baeli - FR - will present Des petits pas vers le Continuous Delivery will be interesting feedback to move to this DevOps mindset. DevOps is a true bridge between several communities, you can look in our last post our speakers on this subject.

At least, two important concepts need to be understood to implement Kanban principles: Lead Time and Cycle Time. Lead Time is the delay between a customer order and the product delivery. Cycle Time is the mechanical delay between the start of the processing and its end. Florence Chabanois with her session - FR - REX Le kanban va-t-il fluidifier notre chaine ? will set a goal of reducing the Cycle Time using Kanban and Retrospective.

Flowing batches are well known in the manufacturing industry from workers to top management. However, product development is different from manufacturing, because batches of plastic are different from batches of software features/user stories. This is what Product Management Flow) is about. When it comes to prioritizing features, the magic term “value” is often heard, with a different definition for each person. “Cost of Delay” sounds good from the R&D to the Chief Executive. Özlem Yüce, Prioritising ideas using Cost of Delay will give us feedback on a real implementation of this notion.

In order to flow the good features to the customers, we need to have an exhaustive list of options, get an opinion about their implication, choose to implement them or to defer them. Olav Maassen, the co-author of Commitment (Best seller at Agile 2013)- How to make better decisions will give us a pragmatic presentation about Real Option Thinking, a way to be efficient and not stressed in a permanent decision-making process.

One of the most difficult positions in a flowing process is related to product/service definition. Before the Business Analysts or the Product Managers were in charge of the definition and promotion of the product. The Product Owner name came from the agile world but created a lot of confusion. Stefan Haas, founder of the #PoDojo learning community - Product Owner Super Powers will discuss the common problems Product Owners face.

The Scrum Master, as defined by Agile literatures, is responsible for managing the Scrum process, but according to many he is also in charge of improving the team. Angel Medinilla will present two frameworks for Developing Great ScrumMasters.

###DESIGN

In your mind, the term “Design” could be related to the look of furniture or buildings (Dieter Rams style), but MiXiT is an Information Technology conference with an empathy emphasis. So...

Design has two different meanings here:

• Experience Design: User/Customer experience and service design (see Forester) focus on developing and managing digital interactions.
• Design thinking: Tools and protocols for discovering new opportunities, finding and solving problems(Wikipedia).

Regarding the former (Experience Design):

Vincent Guigui - FR - Après les NUI will present the Natural User Interface and how to improve user experience using these new sensors.

Vincent Tourraine - Looking at the future of User Interfaces in Sci-Fi will talk about some of the major breakthroughs in User Interfaces as seen in the past Science Fiction culture and will try to imagine what our computers will look like in 50 years.

Geoffrey Dorne - FR - Petit design pour grande humanité will prove to us that a user experience, could be improved, with only small tweaks.

For the latter (Design Thinking)

We used to make products and to say they gave value to the customer. Ok, but the end user doesn’t use only your product, he can call your support service, use your partner service, and much more. Consequently, what matters to the end user is the whole experience. Jens Otto Lange - Design meets Agile will explain how Service Design helps to get a whole understanding of the end user experience and his journey. He will also talk about Design Thinking and how it could help to craft a compelling product vision.

Even if Lego Serious Play is not part of this movement, it is an awesome tool to create strategies for innovation and change. Steve Holyer - Can You Do IT Better? Uncover the Way using LEGO® built this workshop to introduce this powerful tool. Usually you need a one or two day workshop to understand its power.

Design Thinking applied to business is a creative way to find new ideas and make sure they work for the target users. In parallel, the Lean Startup movement has similar goals, but while designer promote more ethnographic approaches with users, Lean Startup advocates just “getting out of the building.” Startups are temporary organisations designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model (Steve Blank ) and they can use this framework to reach this goal.

Jonathan Bonzy & Manuel Ducruet - FR - Le lean startup concret autour d'une petite mousse will explain how they used Lean Startup principles for their company.

Michael Schwartz - FR - Créer un projet autour de ses valeurs will share how he has put his values into his successful startup, La Cordée.

Oana Juncu - TEST DRIVEN BUSINESS For Lean Startup Products proposes a workshop where the measures and tests will be done after the product release but defined before the design of the future product.

Finally, to build your startup, you need prototype and during this workshop Stephane Mor - Des bits aux atomes: re-matérialisons!, you will learn how to program the 3D objects you would like to print.