Last week's Agile 2007 conference was a particularly strong one for me professionally. I participated in a very good panel session on Wednesday as part of the Leadership Symposium where we discussed and debated concepts behind agile portfolio management and governance. It was a strong session with a big audience and lots of great questions - none of which we planted to stimulate or direct the conversation. It was great to share a stage with Luke Hohmann whom I first got to know as a reviewer of my book some 5 years ago - though we both worked at Objectspace in the 1990's but not at the same time. Also on the panel was Niel Nickolaisen of the APLN and another practitioner in the field - though Niel is a CIO so he has some more stripes on his lapels than I do.

On Thursday I used the CWAC (Conference within a Conference) to run two sessions. The first in the morning turned in to a presentation of the history of kanban in development and led directly to the formation of the new Kanbandev group at Yahoo! In the afternoon, I facilitated a discussion to examine what is "Beyond Agile" and to probe in to the notion of whether there ought to be a Post-Agile movement or not. This discussion took a turn I didn't expect. There had been an earlier CWAC session on Tuesday where a group had looked at extending and rewriting the Agile Manifesto in order to include some newer ideas like Trust and Teams. So we pulled both efforts together and explored what it would take to create a cohesive, inclusive community that embraced innovation and new ideas and avoided the tendency to fracture as new ideas emerged. In other words, what it would take to avoid the need for a Post-Agile movement and create a strong community that could embrace change. [Sound familiar?] I have to thank Jim Shore who was particularly influential in steering the conversation in that direction. The session ended up running almost 1 hour longer than planned.

The outcome was a decision that Joe Arnold, Karl Scotland and I would present a Friday Lightning Talk session (5 mins) to sum up what we had concluded as a group. So on Friday, we pitched the need for Agile Model Evolution. We argued that the Agile Manifesto is really two ideas overloaded. It is a rallying cry, a call to arms for the forces of that seek better ways of building software. As a rallying cry it has been hugely successful and the popularity of the conference is testimony to this. However, the Manifesto also includes the abstract concepts of agile development. Together with the Principles it contains an underlying theory or model of agility. And it is this that we felt was now outmoded.

Over the last 6 years our community has learned more and become better at articulating the ideas originally held in 2001. And so it is time for us to evolve a new model to capture these new ideas - like Lean Thinking - and to use our learning to better articulate what has already been defined. We argued that this is essential for the strength and on-going success of the community. Without it, those with new ideas and innovations will feel excluded and will tend to create their own communities of practice leaving the agile community behind.

This resonated strongly with the audience that included folks such as Diana Larsen, Brian Marick and Alistair Cockburn. Later I would repeat it to Luke Hohmann. The outcome from this was that we - Joe, Karl and I - were asked to run with it as an idea. So in the first instance we have formed a Yahoo! group. We have invited all those who attended the CWAC session and anyone else who expressed an interest, including Diana and Luke. If you'd like to be included then please drop me an email to david dot anderson at corbis dot com.

I'll be blogging more about Agile Model Evolution and our ideas to embed this deep in the community as an on-going activity but for now we want the leading thinkers in Agile to come forward and participate.

And so I find myself catapulted to the core of the community driving an effort that is fundamental to the on-going success of agile. I never really expected that when I got on the flight to Reagan National from Seattle last Sunday morning. Technorati tag: Agile, Agile+2007, Agile+Manifesto