Wow, my first webinar went live two days ago and attracted 1,750 attendees! I still can’t wrap my mind around that. My presentation on Hyper Productive Agile was part of gantthead’s annual PMXPO Virtual Conference. 

1. -If you want to watch it, you can sign-up for a free account here and then login. Once inside, go to Conference Hall and select the presentation. Running time is 33 minutes.
   

2. -You can download the slides here (8Mb PDF) and here (1.4 Mb PPTX)
   

3. -You can download a companion article here (PDF) with most all of my talking points
   

As background for those interested, Doug DeCarlo my editor at gantthead, was kind enough to ask me to do it back in March. I had just returned from the Scrum Gathering where I saw Jeff Sutherland’s talk on CMMI + Agile. I was intrigued with his use of the term Hyper Productive to describe teams that were 2x, 4x and 8x more productive than their peers.

Based on my experiences, I knew it was a topic I wanted to explore further and this webinar provided the right opportunity. I tried to keep it short and simple to emphasize a few points:

1. 1.With a solid base of research, agile is more productive than waterfall
   

2. 2.A minority of agile teams are hyper-productive, meaning 2x - 8x more productive.
   

3. 3.Wow, that’s interesting, what are they doing differently?
   

4. 4.Certain practices they use can help explain their extraordinary results
   

5. 5.Your team can use these practices to improve their performances too
   

I’ve received great feedback from attendees, thanks to everyone who joined and thanks to gantthead for a great PMPXO conference.

Related to Hyper Productivity, after I had recorded the webinar I had the pleasure to hear Dan Mezick speak at Agile Richmond about the concept of team intimacy and its influence on hyper productivity. Dan goes into depth on the topics of creating emotionally safe environments to facilitate team learning. Teams that work in these environments, and feel personally safe and safe as a team, achieve higher levels of productivity and happiness.

It not only makes sense but Dan provides research showing this phenomena is not just specific to Scrum teams, but all teams including sports teams, military units, etc. Had I seen Dan’s presentation before I recorded the webinar, I would have included some material from it within the the presentation. Next time...