The APLN board has been working on pilot projects, administrative stuff (you don’t want to know), and preparing for our just held meeting January 22-23 in Houston. We worked on visioning, programming, and organizational sustainability (ok, revenue).

Our visioning session utilized two of Luke Hohmann’s innovation games and his on-line game software (thanks Luke). We used the on-line version in order to involve nearly 30 members around the country in one of the exercises. The visioning sessions: confirmed the importance of closer collaboration with local chapters, encouraged us to continue working to connect, develop, and support agile project leaders, and pushes us further to engage senior managers and executives in creating not only agile teams, but agile organizations.

The programs initiated at the meeting emphasized visibility to our members and action in the next six months. They include:

Chapter Collaboration: This was first titled chapter support, but we want two way collaboration with the national board helping chapters to get established and connected with others and the chapters helping with national programs. The APLN has the most active chapters of any agile professional organization and we want to build on that strength. If you would like to get involved in a local chapter, or start a new one, email to localchapters@apln.org.

Social Media: We decided to transfer our somewhat static web site to a dynamic social media site (visit the site in progress at http://agilepln.ning.com/). This change provides a mechanism for the board and local chapters to collaborate more closely and to engage non-members also. There will be public and members only sections. Please contribute and engage with others on our new site.

Events: We will continue the popular twice yearly Leadership Summits in conjunction with Software Quality Engineering’s Agile Development Practices Conferences (http://www.sqe.com/Agiledevpractices/). Planning has been initiated for a series of agile leadership open space conferences and other types of events.

Action Research: To further our vision of building agile organizations as well as agile teams, this program group is looking to apply action research techniques to surfacing and discussing key leadership issues.

Reaching Out: We will continue several initiatives with other organizations who share our goals.

We encourage you to participate in these programs. The leadership of local chapters will help coordinate participation, so contact these leaders. If you aren’t part of a local group, contact president@apln.org.

We also created several board committees to work on operational issues.

The board believes that the APLN can play a significant role in helping project teams and organizations as they strive to create value through the application of agile practices and principles. Work with us in the coming months to further this vision.




For the board,

Jim Highsmith & Julie Chickering, Co-Presidents