Professionals with 160 unique Roles from 144 different Companies worldwide have registered so far.

Following is the profile of the registered participants:

Learn… Network… Explore…

@ Asia’s Premier Agile and Lean Conference

A refreshing yet intense 3-day conference where you can:

• Learn from over 135 expert practitioners and 120 hand-picked sessions.
• Network & share your knowledge and experience with over 700 eager international delegates from literally every software company practicing or exploring Agile & Lean.
• Explore diverse and interesting solutions and contribute to the future of Agile software development.

AGILE INDIA 2012 (http://agile2012.in/)
17, 18 & 19 February 2012
Le Meridien, Bengaluru.

REGISTER:  http://agile2012.in/registration (register before 12 Jan & save Rs. 1000)

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LEARN

Over 120 hand picked sessions by expert practitioners on Agile, Lean and Lean-Startup covering:

• Agile Development Practices
• Enterprise Agile
• Leadership and Organizational Transformation
• Agile & Outsourcing
• DevOps
• Culture, People & Teams
• Lean Principles & Practices
• Agile Product Management
• Coaching & Mentoring and
• Lean Startups.

Catch up on the latest Research on Agile and Lean practices presented by top international researchers.

Also get a unique opportunity to interact with our 10 specially invited Thought Leaders from our Industry.

Check out the full conference program.
Don’t forget to see the detailed stats about the program.

NETWORK

• Interact with 135 expert practitioners & speakers from 18 Countries.
• Meet all the thought leaders, who put together this wonderful 3-day program (over the last 6 months).
• Exchange ideas with 700 international delegates from literally every successful software company practicing Agile & Lean.

See profile of registered participants.

EXPLORE

Come explore the diverse, interesting solutions Agile & Lean practitioners have discovered to make software development enjoyable. Discover a gamut of problems and solutions practitioners are tackling with their agile adoption.

In the last 10 years, Agile & Lean has fundamentally changed the way successful software companies built software solutions. We’ve solved many core problems, but there are more, interesting problems that need to be solved. Share your thoughts and explore the future of software development.

Participate in an exclusive Open Space, which is part of the Research Cafe.

SPONSOR

Showcase your brand to Asia’s largest Agile and Lean software development conferences delegates. Sponsorship details: http://agile2012.in/sponsors/

Come, be part of the new generation of Agile & Lean Thought Leaders.

SPREAD THE WORD!

Blog: http://blog.agile2012.in/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agileindia
Twitter: #AgileIndai2012

Promote the Agile India 2012 Conference, by showing off these badges on your websites/blogs/etc.

A company called The Energy Project, are experts in the field of work performance and the problem of employee disengagement. They believed that burnout is one of its leading causes, and focused almost exclusively on helping individuals avoid burnouts by managing their energy, as opposed to their time. Time, after all, is finite. By contrast, you can expand your personal energy and also regularly renew it.

They believe that enduring organizational change is possible only if individuals alter their attitudes and behaviors first. But they’ve come to understand that it’s not possible to generate lasting cultural change without deeply involving the whole organization and its senior leadership.

To achieve better Productivity, they encouraged organizations to make two fundamental shifts in the way it manages employees:

1. Stop expecting people to operate like computers—at high speeds, continuously, running multiple programs at the same time—and to recognize that human beings perform best and are most productive when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal.
2. Move from trying to get more out of employees and instead to invest in systematically meeting their four core needs, so they’re fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

Four core needs are:

1. Physical health: achieved through nutrition, sleep, daytime renewal, and exercise
2. Emotional well-being: which grows out of feeling appreciated and valued
3. Mental clarity: the ability to focus intensely, prioritize, and think creatively and
4. Spiritual significance : which comes from the feeling of serving a mission beyond generating a profit.

Several companywide initiatives can help employees boost their energy in the four core areas. For example companies can subsidize healthy meals and a salad bar at their on-site restaurant that’s open to all employees. Hire a dietician on staff and employees can get free consultations. Build new, fully equipped gym and created a large open, grassy commons area where people can hang out and relax. To help employees recharge themselves on a spiritual level, companies can offers its employees paid time off each month to volunteer their services to nonprofits and organizes specific volunteer opportunities for them.

Original Article: The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less

“Its God’s gift” or “S/he was born talented” or “S/He just lucky” is a common myth that undermines the relentless hard-work experts put to attain mastery in their respect work.

Benjamin Bloom, a pioneer who broke this myth found out that:

“All the superb performers, he investigated, had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years.”

Later research, building on Bloom’s study revealed that the amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved.

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that:

“Experts are always made, not born.”

The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint hearted nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take many years if not decades to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice; practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort. You will need a well-informed coach not only to guide you through deliberate practice but also to help you learn how to coach yourself.

One study showed that psychotherapists with advanced degrees and decades of experience aren’t reliably more successful in their treatment of randomly assigned patients than novice therapists with just three months of training are. There are even examples of expertise seeming to decline with experience. The longer physicians have been out of training, for example, the less able they are to identify unusual diseases of the lungs or heart. Because they encounter these illnesses so rarely, doctors quickly forget their characteristic features and have difficulty diagnosing them.

Practice Deliberately: Not all practice makes you perfect. You need a particular kind of practice – “deliberate practice” – to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all.

Let’s imagine you are learning to play golf for the first time. In the early phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes (like driving the ball into another player). You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly short time (perhaps 50 hours), you will develop better control and your game will improve. From then on, you will work on your skills by driving and putting more balls and engaging in more games, until your strokes become automatic: You’ll think less about each shot and play more from intuition. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.

Why does this happen?

You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust your playing style to improve your control. In fact, professionals often take multiple shots from the same location when they train and when they check out a course before a tournament.

Computer gaming is an excellent example where I’ve seen people practice deliberately to get better. They focus on what they can do well, but they also focus on what they can’t do well. Most importantly, when practicing, the gamer is not just mindlessly playing. It’s a very thoughtful, deep, dedicated practice session.

War games serve a similar training function at military academies. So do flight simulators for pilots. Unfortunately in software development, very few people practice deliberately.

Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately. The golfer Ben Hogan once explained, “While I am practicing I am also trying to develop my powers of concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball.”

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning:

1. Improving the skills you already have
2. Extending the reach and range of your skills.

“Practice puts brains in your muscles” – Golf champion Sam Snead

The enormous concentration required undertaking these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them.

How long should you do deliberate practice each day?

“It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely exclusively on their intuition. This leads to difficulties when they deal with atypical or rare cases, because they’ve lost the ability to analyze a situation and work through the right response. Experts may not recognize this creeping intuition bias, of course, because there is no penalty until they encounter a situation in which a habitual response fails and maybe even causes damage.

Many research show the importance of a coach/mentor in deliberate practice. Some strongly favor an apprenticeship model. However one needs to be aware of the limitation of just following a coach or working alongside an “expert.”

Statistics show that radiologists correctly diagnose breast cancer from X-rays about 70% of the time. Typically, young radiologists learn the skill of interpreting X-rays by working alongside an “expert.” So it’s hardly surprising that the success rate has stuck at 70% for a long time. Imagine how much better radiology might get if radiologists practiced instead by making diagnostic judgments using X-rays in a library of old verified cases, where they could immediately determine their accuracy.

All an all, “Living in a cave does not make you a geologist” .i.e. without deliberate practice you go no where.

Original Article: The Making of an Expert

1. Dennis Ritchie – one of the creators of the Unix operating system and author of C programming language
2. Ken Olsen – Co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp, the company that built PDP-7 (first computer to run Unix)
3. Paul Baran – an important Internet pioneer who developed packet switching
4. Jacob Goldman – in 1969 came up with the idea of setting up an independent research lab for copier-maker Xerox Corp, which lead to inventing the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming
5. John McCarthy – Creator of Lisp and the person who coined the term “artificial intelligence”
6. John R. Opel – IBM Chairman John Opel ushered IBM’s PC into the market, taking over as CEO of the company in 1981
7. Ashawna Hailey – AMD’s first Intel-compatible chip, the 9080, was built in 1974, by a team led by Ashawna Hailey
8. Jean Bartik – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the world’s first electronic computer’s programming was done by a crackerjack team of six women lead by Jean.
9. Nobutoshi Kihara – Sony’s chief inventor. His groundbreaking work on magnetic tape recorders, videotape, and digital photography
10. Robert Galvin – ran Motorola for nearly 30 years, ushering in the world’s first portable telephone and turning the small two-way radio manufacturing company he inherited from his father into the world’s leader in cellular phones
11. Charles Walton – patented the technology used in RFID chips in the 1970s

Original Article: 11 Who Died in 2011 (And Were Not Named Steve)

1. Get specific with your goals
2. Seize the moment to act on your goals
3. Track progress – Know exactly how far you have left to go
4. Be a realistic optimist
5. Focus on getting better, rather than already possessing that skill
6. Have grit (commit & persist)
7. Build your willpower muscle
8. Don’t overtax (tempt fate) yourself
9. Don’t just focus on what you don’t want to do, also focus on what you will do instead

Details: Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

1. Pursue what you love – Passion is an incredible motivator
2. Do the hardest work first
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods
4. Seek expert (simple and precise) feedback, in intermittent doses
5. Take regular renewal breaks
6. Ritualize practice

Details: Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

I’m extremely happy to announce the Agile India 2012 Conference Program.

We’ll be hosting total of 12 Stages, 120 Sessions, 125 Speakers from 18 Countries. Detailed stats below:

With a wide variety of session types:

63% of session targeted at practitioners:

Large number of 60 and 90 mins sessions:

We’ve 120 speakers selected through the submissions system and 5+ invited speakers:

We had an extremely good team of 111 program committee members from 21 Countries who reviewed all the submission and selected the conference program:

Did you know how truly diverse the Agile India 2012 conference program committee is?

That’s right! We have over 100 members from 21 countries.