On Dec. 4, we had a guest speaker for the Organizational Behavioral class. His name was Yves Lin, one of the co-founders of Titansoft.
This company in Singapore and Taiwan adopted Agile methodology into their business in 2014, and their business has since grow rapidly.

Shortly after a brief introductory of his company’s profile and milestone, we quickly jump into the topic “What is Agile”.
Typically, this is done by browsing through numerous powerpoint slides.
However, for this session we began with forming into groups. In each group, we nominated a facilitator and started a discussion of “our problems in daily work”.
Each group then picked 3 critical problems to share with the students in class. These problems were then categorized and posted on the wall.
Only after this discussion, did the speaker show us the introductory slides of “What is Agile”.
The slides were short, and easy to understand. Then, each group selected 1 problem and were asked to brainstorm potential solutions.
Each group then got to present their solution to the audience. This concluded a small Agile method of problem solving.

Before ending the session, students had the opportunity to raise questions to the speaker on how to implement Agile into daily work and what kind of approach they could begin with.
An experienced guest speaker from the industry actually helps students feel more connected and realistic as most of the students works full-time, either for corporate or as an entrepreneur.
Today’s session in general provides a good exposure to the methodology and definitely helps us all in our career.

Personally, I understand Agile and Scrum as something related to software development but through today’s sessions, I get to know that it’s actually not limited to software development, yet can be implemented in different scenarios.
This hence inspired me to work closer with my client to understand their problems/difficulties and try to explore possible solutions together.

Since Agile has been a well-known terminology in recent years, it’s an excellent arrangement by GMBA professor for hosting such speaker event during the class session.
At NTU GMBA program, we not only study books and going through slides of theories, we often has guest speaker from various industry that brings us some real case and example happening in the real world.