Am I the only one who is disappointed with the lack of vision and leadership in the Agile 2009 program? The Breaking Acts stage is gone from next year's event. There is no explicit place in the program for innovation that doesn't already fit with the established notion of agile. After dedicating the largest share of my main stage speech in 2008 to this topic I am extremely disappointed that innovation and new agile method ideas don't seem to be important to the organizing committee.

Equally, there is no explicit place for Lean in the program. Given the very evident shift in the community towards Lean principles and practices and the rapid growth of kanban, and the fact that the Gordon Pask Award was given to Kenji Hiranabe and Arlo Belshee explicitly for their contributions bringing Lean/Kanban ideas to the agile community, this is a truly surprising ommission.

But what surprises me more is the degree of duplication in the published program. What for example, is the difference between Agile Product Management and Customers & Business Value?

One of them asks us for "best practices for prioritization/ROI, getting customer input, roadmaps and releases, etc. Commercial products (for revenue) versus internal projects (for in-house customers)" and the other for "Defining and measuring the business value of projects, features, and processes. Using business value as a means of deciding which functionality to pursue. nventing, prioritizing, managing, and validating requirements. Working with customers and stakeholders Process/Mechanics"

And then there is Agile Adoption and Agile & Organizational Culture. What is the difference?

The latter asks us for "Agile is all about changing your organization. It's not only about changing the way you think and work. Improving your organization's agility in a sustainable way may also require changing its underlying values and principles. Change doesn't come easy. An agile initiative doesn't take place in a vacuum; it has to interface with the existing (organizational) culture. Both will influence each other as change takes place. This is a process of mutual adaptation, where one possible result is that the agile initiative can fail because the neither the organization nor the agile initiative is sufficiently adaptable."

while the former suggests... "Knowing what Agile is quite different from knowing how to roll out an Agile process. The Agile Adoption stage will focus on lessons learned from rolling out an Agile process. [...] How can you assess your potential for becoming Agile before starting a migration? How can you minimize delivery risk when moving to an Agile process? How can you implement an Agile process that recognizes your unique business model, customer, and company culture? What does the Agile migration process look like in application? What are the key foundation steps for starting a move to Agile? What are the best practices for getting executives, managers, customers and team members to buy-in to moving to an Agile process? Can you mix Agile practices with your existing processes when migrating to Agile? Can you migrate too quickly? Can you migrate too slowly? How can you sell adopting Agile during the current financial crisis?"

Does one of these sound like a subset of the other?

And then there is a Telling Our Stories stage that asks for experience reports, but then so do almost all of the other stages.

I can't help feeling that with some portfolio management of the program, the committee could have consolidated the existing stages and freed up 3 slots to use for something else. I personally would like to see the Breaking Acts stage back again. And I'd like to see a Lean stage. What else would you like to see at the Agile conference?

Update: Read Johanna Rothman's reply.  Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Chicago, Agile+Alliance, Lean, Kanban, David+Anderson