This month we welcomed Lean Agile Manchester to our support centre at One Angel Square for the first time. This meet-up ran by Ian Carroll brings together local Agile practitioners from around Manchester and the North West.

The evening started with Tom Loosemore, our Digital Services Director. Tom shared his experiences of introducing an Agile mindset and ways of working to more traditional organisations. It was a really insightful talk on some key learnings he’s made along the way.

The night was complimented by some great lightning talks. Gemma Cameron updated us on the upcoming tech events in Manchester. Ruta Blazeviciute spoke about the importance of changing organisations from the inside. Kevin Rutherford shared with us why it’s critical to bring your developers along on any agile adoption journey.
I closed the night with a brief introduction to an estimating technique that Kevin had introduced to me a few years ago. Rather than guess the estimate for the story, Kevin’s technique challenges the story to fit into the time and collect data that can be used to relatively size for future items. Keeping the stories small also ensures you’re not spending lots of time estimating work you may never do if priorities change.

Thank you to all the speakers and to everyone who came along.
We’ll be hosting future Agile events in 2017, we’ll share them on Twitter nearer the time.