#NoFrameworks at Agile Middle East 2020

I'm proud to say that I will be giving the opening keynote speech at Agile Middle East (ME) 2020 on March 11th in Dubai. My title of my keynote is #NoFrameworks: How We Can Take Agile Back! which is a reprise of my keynote from the XP 2019 conference last May in Montreal.

A fundamental philosophy from the early days of Agile is that teams should own their process. Today we would say that they should be allowed, and better yet, enabled, to choose their own way of working (WoW).

This was a powerful vision, but it was quickly abandoned to make way for the Agile certification gold rush. Why do the hard work of learning your craft, of improving your WoW via experimentation and learning, when you can instead become a certified master of an agile method in two days or a program consultant of a scaling framework in four? It sounds great, and certainly is great for anyone collecting the money, but 19 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto as an industry we’re nowhere near reaching Agile’s promise. Nowhere near it.

Agile had it right in the very beginning, and the lean community had it right all along – teams need to own their process, they must be enabled to choose their WoW. To do this we need to stop looking for easy answers, we must reject the simplistic solutions that the agile industrial complex wants to sell us, and most importantly recognize that we need #NoFrameworks.

As you can see from the conference schedule there is a great line up of speakers. To help support the conference Project Management Institute (PMI) has gotten the organizers to agree to a 20% discount when you use the code "PMI" in all caps when you register. I'm looking forward to the event and if you're in the area I hope you will choose to attend the conference.