Agile Philippines Meetup (Nov 2019)
Agile Philippines closed its 2019 meetup year with Indra Philippines. The November meetup brought the community to Marco Polo Ortigas for an Open Space evening that mixed practical delivery questions, agile coaching topics, and a few firsts for the group.
Hosted by Indra Philippines
Indra Philippines hosted the final Agile Philippines meetup of 2019, its first time hosting the community. Dante Requiz, Operations Manager of Digital Technologies and Operations, welcomed the group, and Pablo Barbero, Delivery Center Unit Head of Indra Philippines, shared Indra's experience helping organizations become more agile.
The event was also the community's first meetup in a hotel, held at Marco Polo Ortigas. That made the last meetup of the year feel like a distinct closing point for a busy 2019.
Open Space for the year-end meetup
The meetup used Open Space facilitation, with five topic areas in each round arranged around I-N-D-R-A. The group ran three 20-minute rounds, with short breaks between rounds so participants could choose where to contribute next.
The first round focused on delivery roles and readiness: how project managers fit in agile, Definition of Ready, how agile can help when a project is already delayed, business analysts acting as Product Owners, and ideal committed story points per sprint.
Topics from the discussion board
The second round moved into team habits and client-facing delivery. Participants discussed effective retrospectives, client management in agile, learning through games, removing silo mentality from Scrum Teams, and the difference between working hard and working smart.
The final round covered engineering practice and organizational change: Test Driven Development, agile coaching, whether agile is a lasting shift or a passing trend, teaming, and how onshore products work when the Product Owner is offshore.
The variety of topics captured a common theme from the 2019 meetups: teams were not just asking how to run Scrum ceremonies, but how to make agile useful under real pressure from clients, schedules, roles, distributed work, and organizational structure.
Closing 2019
The evening wrapped up after 9:00 PM with a raffle and the community's big closing circle. Agile Philippines thanked Indra Philippines and the people who made the meetup possible, then noted that the November event completed another full year of monthly meetups.
For ToolTwist, the November 2019 meetup is a useful snapshot of agile community practice: people comparing delivery patterns, testing assumptions, and learning from the problems other teams are actively solving.
Source: Agile Philippines Meetup 2019.11