Agile Africa 2017 Conference – another great opportunity to touch-base with other Agile Professionals across South Africa, Africa and to have some amazing international speakers come visit our country. Thank you to the Agile Africa Committee and Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) for organising again this year.
Here are my sketches from Agile Africa…
You can download the full booklet of my sketchnotes here: Sketchnoter’s Guide to Agile Africa 2017.
We were fortunate to be accepted to present our Visual Thinking (Sketching outside the Box) workshop at Agile2017 this year in Orlando, Florida. All I can say is “Wow”! What an amazing experience meeting awesome, like-minded people from around the world. I did behave a bit like a groupie, and yes, possibly asked for some autographs…
I have compiled a little booklet of all of the sketchnotes that I did from the conference – some light reading until next year (and for those who may not have been able to attend).
Some highlights from Agile2017 below (all sketches are included in link above)…
Thank you Agile Alliance and all those who were involved in organising, and took the time to attend.
Check out #Agile2017 and #Agile17 to view the conversations from the conference. I was not the only sketchnoter at the conference, please check out the awesome sketches from the other visual thinkers there:
Please comment if I’ve left anyone out…
How do we improve education, both formally and informally? How do we create a culture of continuous learning? How do we stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation?
These are all extremely difficult questions, and although we may not have all the answers now, it’s inspiring to see people stepping up and actively trying to address some of these questions.
Mark Sham is one of these people. A few years ago he started Suits & Sneakers to offer people access to great speakers for free! He made an assumption: if we make access to inspirational and informative speakers available to people for free, that they would come to learn. And boy was he right!
On Thursday 25 May, he had the 5th Suits & Sneakers event and it was packed! The next day, for the first time this year, he also organised a full day conference, Real Life MBA, with a line-up of 24 amazing speakers across 4 tracks. The idea behind this format is that there’s no way you can watch all the talks on one day. So in order to get the full value out of the conference, all the presentations were filmed and will be made available to view afterwards. Mark has challenged everyone at the conference to set up working groups with colleagues and friends to go through the remaining presentations in 12 weeks after the conference.
To do my small part, I’ve put together a mini “Sketchnoter’s Guide” for the Real Life MBA conference. It only has the presentations that I could attend on the day – you can download the PDF here.
Here are some of the sketchnotes from the Real Life MBA conference:
But I will take up Mark Sham’s challenge to work on the other presentations over the next few weeks and share them for those who are interested.
I had the privilege of being invited to the Project Management South Africa (PMSA) conference last year to sketchnote for leaders in online education, GetSmarter.
The theme of the conference was “Harnessing the Power of Innovation” – a pressing topic in the project management industry both in South Africa and abroad. There were exceptional speakers at the conference who presented talks on a range of thought-provoking topics pertinent to the idea of innovation in project management.
In the spirit of the event, GetSmarter put together the Sketchnoter’s Guide to Innovation in Project Management – a downloadable collection of live sketchnotes from the day. The guide includes a host of visual representations of the day’s presentations including:
Here is a sneak peek at some of the sketches and topics covered at the conference. To download the full guide, click here.
Last week was the Regional Scrum Gathering in South Africa, which was organised by SUGSA. So some of my colleagues and I from IQ Business took a trip down to Cape Town, what an awesome experience!
I was fortunate to be selected as a speaker. My colleague, Angie Doyle, and I facilitated a workshop on Visual Thinking for Agile Teams which was extremely well received – it’s exciting to see the interest and enthusiasm that people have for thinking visually! You can follow this link to view our “slides” from the workshop – all were created using flip charts.
I also used this opportunity to sketchnote the presentations and workshops I attended, there were lots of interesting topics. It’s always uplifting to get together with other Agile Practitioners and talk about what’s going on in the industry.
There was a lot of conversation and other sketchnoters (some new ones after the Visual Thinking workshop) who also posted sketches during the conference, to have a look at these you can check out the #SGZA and #SGZA2016 tags on Twitter.
Here are mine:
Last Thursday I attended a DevOps conference – Africa DevOps Day 2016 – which was hosted by FNB. The day was themed around “DevOps Skills for the Future - The Next Generation“.
It was a great demonstration of collaboration and knowledge sharing across the Banking Industry and other industries to pioneer DevOps practices in South Africa.
You can have a look at the conversation on Twitter #AfricaDevOpsDay, there are some amazing quotes and conversations that were shared on Twitter.
Here are the sketches I did on the day:
Twitter: @dctpreece
Twitter: @danacton
Twitter: @ReneshM
Twitter: @Jason_Suttie
Twitter: @xthestreams
You can download the full booklet of all of the sketchnotes above, here.
Thanks to Peter Alkema and the organising team, we also all had plenty of space available to record our Light bulb Moments and suggestions from the day.
I had the privilege of being invited to attend the BA Summit Southern Africa this year as the official Sketchnoter for the conference. The BA Summit is organised annually by the South African chapter of the IIBA, the IIBASA.
I must admit, I was extremely impressed by the high standard of the organisation of the event and the calibre of speakers. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that the sketchnotes reflect this.
The organisers of the event put together a consolidated guide of all of the sketchnotes, which you can download here: “A Sketchnoter’s Guide to the BA Summit“.
Mohamed Bray – Business Analysis is for the Ambitious!
Twitter: @mo_bray
Vusi Thembekwayo – Barbarians at the Gate
Twitter: @VusiThembekwayo
Themba Baloyi – The Power of Business Processes to make a significant difference in people’s lives
Twitter: @thembalih
Alex Noel – The Bulletproof Business Analyst
Twitter: @BulletProof_BA
I wasn’t able to attend all of the talks as there were three tracks at the conference. These were the ones that I was able to capture…
Adrian Reed (@UKAdrianReed) – You work in Sales
Francois Combrinck (@Fcombrinck) – From Stakeholders to Partners
Curtis Michelson (@SpecsRex) – Create a Context for Change
Anton Oosthuizen (@Disrupted_BA) – Cheap User Stories: the Agile Achilles Heel
Andrej Gustin – Do we all react the same way?
Ryan Folster (@RyanFolsterSA) – The Evolution of the Strategic Business Analyst
Ronak Sanghavi (@SanghaviRonak) – Fresh Graduate to entry level BA in 9 weeks!
Paige dos Santos (@PaigeCathryn) – Digital Innovation in Africa
Munyaradzi Husvu – Model Based Analysis in Agile Environments
That’s it from the BA Summit 2016: Business Analysis Rising. To find out more about this annual event which is held in South Africa, you can drop them a line on Twitter @basummitsa.
I have finally finished reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. What an inspiring read!
I feel like there is so much in this book, I could do a sketchnote for every chapter (see my previous one on Failure). Maybe if I have time I will…
I’m currently listening to Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull on Audible and absolutely loving it. I am almost finished, but couldn’t wait to do a little sketchnote.
There was a chapter around Failure which really resonated with me. Why are we so scared of failure? Where did this fear come from? How do we deal with this failure in a creative environment?
