IT governance models have been developed largely to deal with traditional waterfall-style development. The rapid increase in the adoption of Agile software development raises a variety of important questions about governance:
• Can existing governance models deal with Agile development?
• How well have those existing governance models been dealing with IT performance and risk management?
• What new patterns for IT governance might be necessary to realise the benefits of faster time-to-market and better IT business alignment promised by more Agile delivery models?
This seminar will explore these and related questions from the perspective of lessons learned from enterprise Agile adoption.
• ThoughtWorks has been assisting organisations in Agile adoption for over 10 years and deals regularly with the challenges of governance and compliance protocols
• Suncorp is carrying out the largest Agile change programme in Australia and has had to grapple with numerous governance concerns
• Lonely Planet’s award-winning web site was recently relaunched after an extensive retooling of its development practices, featuring both Agile adoption and fundamental changes to its operational model
About the Speakers
Nigel Dalton, GM IT, Lonely Planet
When Nigel joined Lonely Planet in 2007, the seeds of an Agile IT organisation had just been planted. With ThoughtWorks’ assistance, Nigel introduced Agile practices across the enterprise and was instrumental at introducing and embedding Agile governance at the board level.
Josh Melville, Executive Manager, Suncorp
Josh is Executive Manager, Portfolio and Performance Services within Suncorp Business Technology and is responsible for portfolio and performance reporting, strategy coordination and risk and compliance. Josh was previously a Change Leader on the Suncorp BT Agile Change Program, responsible for maintaining the overall program of work, tracking performance and managing relationships with the Agile strategic partners.
Lindy Stephens, Professional Services Manager, ThoughtWorks
Lindy has over 10 years experience in working as a Project / Programme Manager for software delivery projects, mostly working with large Australian financial institutions. During this time, Lindy was often called upon to help organisations transition from more traditional software development approaches to what is now colloquially known as Agile software development.
The document discusses the evolution of test frameworks from record and playback to behavior driven testing (BDT) and how BDT has now gone mobile with tools like Calabash for iOS and Android. It provides an example of using Calabash to test an iOS app, describing how Calabash works, useful commands, and how custom steps are defined. Key benefits of BDT noted are that specifications are not rewritten and context implementations are less painful to fix than rewriting tests.
Recrutamento Ágil: Muito Além do SoftwareThoughtworks
O documento discute os princípios e práticas de recrutamento da ThoughtWorks, uma comunidade apaixonada por revolucionar o design e criação de software enquanto defende uma mudança social positiva. A ThoughtWorks enfatiza a colaboração, excelência técnica, entrega contínua e melhoria contínua ao invés de apenas seguir processos. O foco é recrutar pessoas e valorizar as interações entre elas.
Agile Data Insights: Decisões de Negócios Guiadas por DadosThoughtworks
O documento discute como insights de dados podem guiar decisões de negócios de forma ágil. Apresenta exemplos de como a Amazon usa dados para antecipar necessidades de clientes e como pesquisas mostram que fatores sociais influenciam escolhas das pessoas. Também descreve níveis de maturidade em análise de dados e técnicas como árvores de decisão e redes neurais para gerar insights.
ThoughtWorks Retail and Onefinestay - Business Model Innovation - Retail Week...Thoughtworks
Miranda Cresswell of Onefinestay and Mark Collin of ThoughtWorks Retail discussed 'Driving Business Model Innovation' at Retail Week Buzz 2016 in London
O documento discute cinco anti-padrões de integração contínua, incluindo o uso de branches de longa duração, desenvolvimento e testes em etapas separadas, builds demorados, check-ins em builds falhos e descaso com o processo de build. Ele também fornece dicas sobre como evitar esses anti-padrões através da disciplina e do uso de ferramentas de automação.
#DigitalNudge - Tendências entre Psicologia Cognitiva, Behavioral Economics e...Thoughtworks
Apresentação de Fabio Pereira no BINTECH (Banking and Insurance Technology Forum Brasil) 2016. Nessa apresentação, Fabio fala sobre economia comportamental, psicologia cognitiva e o que isso tem a ver com Transformação Digital e o setor de Seguros.
Veja mais conteúdos interessantes sobre Transformação Digital aqui: https://info.thoughtworks.com/liderando-a-revolucao-digital.html
Olhares Diversos, Oportunidades Iguais | ThoughtWorks na HSMThoughtworks
O documento discute a diversidade e inclusão na ThoughtWorks. A empresa acredita que a diversidade de perspectivas leva a melhores soluções e busca promover igualdade de oportunidades. A ThoughtWorks tem mais de 20 anos de experiência em tecnologia e inovação e defende a justiça social em seus pilares.
Design System as a Product - Maria Elena Duenias, Esther Butcher
Design systems are a great example where web development and design meet. You can find innumerable resources on the internet, books and conferences on how to build them, and how they are exactly what your organization needs. But, building one requires a lot more than following a recipe. In this talk we are going to discuss how to build a design system as an internal product, and how it evolves to become what the users need.
The document discusses the evolution of test frameworks from record and playback to behavior driven testing (BDT) and how BDT has now gone mobile with tools like Calabash for iOS and Android. It provides an example of using Calabash to test an iOS app, describing how Calabash works, useful commands, and how custom steps are defined. Key benefits of BDT noted are that specifications are not rewritten and context implementations are less painful to fix than rewriting tests.
Recrutamento Ágil: Muito Além do SoftwareThoughtworks
O documento discute os princípios e práticas de recrutamento da ThoughtWorks, uma comunidade apaixonada por revolucionar o design e criação de software enquanto defende uma mudança social positiva. A ThoughtWorks enfatiza a colaboração, excelência técnica, entrega contínua e melhoria contínua ao invés de apenas seguir processos. O foco é recrutar pessoas e valorizar as interações entre elas.
Agile Data Insights: Decisões de Negócios Guiadas por DadosThoughtworks
O documento discute como insights de dados podem guiar decisões de negócios de forma ágil. Apresenta exemplos de como a Amazon usa dados para antecipar necessidades de clientes e como pesquisas mostram que fatores sociais influenciam escolhas das pessoas. Também descreve níveis de maturidade em análise de dados e técnicas como árvores de decisão e redes neurais para gerar insights.
ThoughtWorks Retail and Onefinestay - Business Model Innovation - Retail Week...Thoughtworks
Miranda Cresswell of Onefinestay and Mark Collin of ThoughtWorks Retail discussed 'Driving Business Model Innovation' at Retail Week Buzz 2016 in London
O documento discute cinco anti-padrões de integração contínua, incluindo o uso de branches de longa duração, desenvolvimento e testes em etapas separadas, builds demorados, check-ins em builds falhos e descaso com o processo de build. Ele também fornece dicas sobre como evitar esses anti-padrões através da disciplina e do uso de ferramentas de automação.
#DigitalNudge - Tendências entre Psicologia Cognitiva, Behavioral Economics e...Thoughtworks
Apresentação de Fabio Pereira no BINTECH (Banking and Insurance Technology Forum Brasil) 2016. Nessa apresentação, Fabio fala sobre economia comportamental, psicologia cognitiva e o que isso tem a ver com Transformação Digital e o setor de Seguros.
Veja mais conteúdos interessantes sobre Transformação Digital aqui: https://info.thoughtworks.com/liderando-a-revolucao-digital.html
Olhares Diversos, Oportunidades Iguais | ThoughtWorks na HSMThoughtworks
O documento discute a diversidade e inclusão na ThoughtWorks. A empresa acredita que a diversidade de perspectivas leva a melhores soluções e busca promover igualdade de oportunidades. A ThoughtWorks tem mais de 20 anos de experiência em tecnologia e inovação e defende a justiça social em seus pilares.
Design System as a Product - Maria Elena Duenias, Esther Butcher
Design systems are a great example where web development and design meet. You can find innumerable resources on the internet, books and conferences on how to build them, and how they are exactly what your organization needs. But, building one requires a lot more than following a recipe. In this talk we are going to discuss how to build a design system as an internal product, and how it evolves to become what the users need.
Designers, Developers and Dogs: Finding the magic balance between product and tech - Charlotte Vorbeck, ShareNow and Sahil Bajaj
How can an agile delivery team become a successful product team? When does collaboration between product and tech succeed and when not? Why do people in some teams inspire each other while others in the same environment don't speak the same language? In this talk we want to share our learnings and experiences from rebuilding an internal tool for customer support at ShareNow. What could have been just another boring rewrite surprisingly became one of our best experiences in collaboration. We will look at how a joint discovery phase helped us to come up with a shared vision, how a better team setup enabled us to do the necessary work, how focusing on the customer kept us aligned during our journey, and also how we built upon existing collaborative techniques to achieve this new level of cooperation and trust.
During this presentation, Ward Coessens, ThoughtWorks' Consultant will share best practice insights from the Daimler partnership, helping the automotive group on their cloud innovation journey.
How to create more business impact with flexible teams - Jan Hegewald, Zalando & Rebekka Beels, Zalando
Usually, Software Engineering teams are organized around a fixed set of components which they develop further and maintain. Such component teams gain a high level of expert knowledge about their services. However, with agile product development, it often is difficult to implement the most important initiatives with such teams. This leads to a situation where the teams do not work on the most relevant business topics but on those for the respective team. At Zalando, we introduced a new model where we shape teams flexibly around business goals to create the highest impact. How we organize these teams and which challenges especially for the software quality need to be addressed, will be explored in this talk.
Amazon’s Culture of Innovation & The Working Backwards session
Working Backwards; leading organisations achieve growth by marrying customer-obsession with a modern technology strategy. Where do you begin? By focusing on the customer.
During this webinar, Amazon will discuss key innovation principles which have been instrumental in their continued success and their Working Backwards approach.
Dual-Track Agile for Discovery & Development - Adriana Katrandzhieva
The talk will focus on one of the ways teams can ensure continuous delivery and design in their projects. The so-called ‘Dual-track’ model shows the parallel tracks of discovery and development throughout the product design and delivery process. These continually feedback into each other informing new hypothesis that can be tested in order to be proven/disproven. This model is not always easy to implement out of the box and so I will share my own experiences in applying it in practice - what worked, what didn't and how the model can be adjusted to fit different teams and organisational environments.
This document discusses developer experience (DX) and how to design for it. It begins with introductions of the presenters and defines DX as the experience developers have when using a product. It then discusses understanding developer pain points and personas, designing the developer journey, and using different interfaces like APIs, portals, and CLIs. The document outlines challenges in the design process like getting buy-in and measuring DX metrics. It argues that improving DX benefits business goals like enabling experiments, increasing flexibility, and attracting talent. It concludes that developers are also users and designers, and that DX is important to consider for business reasons.
When we design together - Sabrina Mach, Ammara Gafoor and James Emmott
From three distinct perspectives, this talk will contend that design is an activity undertaken by everyone in a software development team. It occurs throughout the process of delivery — not only at the beginning or the end — and it is a powerful instrument for learning about and adapting to the problems our work seeks to solve, which is a shared responsibility. Making the best use of our multidisciplinary expertise in the activity of design requires forms of collaboration that are too often disrupted by the role-based silos that keep us separated and weaken the valuable contribution our diverse approaches could make to our collective efforts. If you care about accelerating time to market, improving customer experience, or building happy and productive teams, you will want to know why and how it matters that we believe ‘design is in everything that we do’.
Hardware is hard(er): designing for distributed user experiences in IoT - Claire Rowland, www.clairerowland.com
Designing connected devices and hardware-enabled services is significantly more complex than pure software. There are more devices on which code can run, connectivity and data sharing patterns to consider, and often multiple and varied touchpoints for users to interact with. Pulling this all together into a coherent experience involves strong collaboration between design and engineering, and a systems thinking approach to UX. In this talk, we’ll introduce what designers need to know about the tech, what engineers need to know about UX for IoT, and how to facilitate the whole-collaboration needed to create great products.
www.clairerowland.com
Customer-centric innovation enabled by cloudThoughtworks
Working Backwards - Leading organisations achieve growth by marrying customer-obsession with a modern technology strategy. In this upcoming webinar, we’ve partnered with AWS to bring you exclusive insights from one of the world’s most innovative companies, Amazon.
The document discusses Amazon's culture of innovation. It emphasizes starting with the customer and working backwards to develop solutions. Amazon focuses on small, autonomous teams that are nimble and own their work. The company's leadership principles guide decision-making and encourage inventiveness, customer obsession, high standards, and long-term thinking to solve customer problems.
The document discusses techniques for establishing shorter feedback loops between developing features and measuring user behavior, including:
1) Shadow traffic which runs new and old features simultaneously to get early feedback without users noticing a difference.
2) Visual reports which assess the quality of a feature through a report (e.g. HTML page) of key metrics.
3) A/B testing which statistically compares user behavior between a control and test group after exposing each to a different variant of a feature. Sample size considerations and statistical significance are discussed.
As a tech leader at ThoughtWorks, a large part of my job involves recommending practices to our clients so they can build and deliver good quality software faster. In doing so repeatedly for many clients I have created a toolkit that contains practical advice from being on the ground. This is what we do, we know it works. When Julius Caesar entered Rome with his army by crossing the river Rubicon, he did something that couldn’t be undone ever again. In your journey as a leader, avoid mistakes that are difficult to correct later. Here are a set of practices that you want to adopt as soon as possible.
Handling error conditions is a core part of the software we write. However, we often treat it as a second class citizen, obscuring our intent through abuse of null values and exceptions that make our code hard to understand and maintain. In the functional programming community, it is common to use datatypes such as Option, Either or Validated to make our intentions explicit when dealing with errors. We can leverage the compiler to verify that we are handling them instead of hoping for the best at runtime. This results in code that is clearer, without hidden path flows. We’ll show how we have been doing this in Kotlin, with the help of the Arrow library.
Mutation testing in software development surfaced in academia during the 70's and has recently seen a resurgence in popularity as a legitimate tool in your testing arsenal. In this session we review the conventional testing pyramid, modern approaches to testing software and look at how mutation testing can help fill in those blind spots.
The document discusses security challenges and best practices for Docker containers. It outlines risks at different stages of the container lifecycle from image development to deployment. Key risks include lack of isolation, complex ecosystems, and known vulnerabilities. The document recommends practices like using linting and scanning during development, restricting resources and access controls at deployment, and signing images from trusted sources to improve container security.
Mainframes handle 30 billion business transactions each day and 87% of all credit card transactions*, they are not traditionally associated with flexible, fail-fast development approaches. Can we bring the practices of agile, CI/CD and fully automated deployments to applications running on a mainframe? During our talk, we'll tell you a story about test automation; redefining the smallest testable unit of a program. And we'll discuss our learnings from introducing continuous integration and agile practices to the world of insurance and mainframes.
*9 Mainframe statistics that may surprise you
ThoughtWorks' Lucy Kurian, James Lewis & Kief Morris discuss tech trends in our latest Technology Radar, covering techniques, platforms, tools, languages and frameworks.
The document discusses the benefits of exercise for mental health. Regular physical activity can help reduce anxiety and depression and improve mood and cognitive functioning. Exercise boosts blood flow, releases endorphins, and promotes changes in the brain which help regulate emotions and stress levels.
The document discusses the benefits of exercise for mental health. Regular physical activity can help reduce anxiety and depression and improve mood and cognitive function. Exercise causes chemical changes in the brain that may help protect against mental illness and improve symptoms.
Do No Harm: Do Technologists Need a Code of Ethics?Thoughtworks
Nothing is neutral, and the technology we design and build, isn’t objective. How do we ensure that what starts out as a great idea, doesn’t unintentionally (or intentionally) harm? Trolling, racially biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, how do we assess our creations through an ethical lens so our products don’t amplify social biases? Do we need a code of ethics? How do we build ethics in our practice?
In this talk Sofia explores these questions and builds on the conversations that are happening globally within the technology community. She also talks about the Responsible Tech Playbook that ThoughtWorks is building which collate ethical frameworks and explore how to use them in design and delivery of software.
SPEAKER:
Sofia Woods, Senior Experience Designer, ThoughtWorks
Sofia has over 10 years experience solving complex problems and designing digital products, experiences and services across government, financial services, transport and the private sectors. She’s a multi-disciplined designer, experienced with the whole gamut of Human Centred Design approaches including UX research, user interface design, prototyping/ testing and can apply this approach in large scale software delivery environments. Blending human centred design with strategy and technology, she creates meaningful experiences that transform.
inQuba Webinar Mastering Customer Journey Management with Dr Graham HillLizaNolte
HERE IS YOUR WEBINAR CONTENT! 'Mastering Customer Journey Management with Dr. Graham Hill'. We hope you find the webinar recording both insightful and enjoyable.
In this webinar, we explored essential aspects of Customer Journey Management and personalization. Here’s a summary of the key insights and topics discussed:
Key Takeaways:
Understanding the Customer Journey: Dr. Hill emphasized the importance of mapping and understanding the complete customer journey to identify touchpoints and opportunities for improvement.
Personalization Strategies: We discussed how to leverage data and insights to create personalized experiences that resonate with customers.
Technology Integration: Insights were shared on how inQuba’s advanced technology can streamline customer interactions and drive operational efficiency.
Designers, Developers and Dogs: Finding the magic balance between product and tech - Charlotte Vorbeck, ShareNow and Sahil Bajaj
How can an agile delivery team become a successful product team? When does collaboration between product and tech succeed and when not? Why do people in some teams inspire each other while others in the same environment don't speak the same language? In this talk we want to share our learnings and experiences from rebuilding an internal tool for customer support at ShareNow. What could have been just another boring rewrite surprisingly became one of our best experiences in collaboration. We will look at how a joint discovery phase helped us to come up with a shared vision, how a better team setup enabled us to do the necessary work, how focusing on the customer kept us aligned during our journey, and also how we built upon existing collaborative techniques to achieve this new level of cooperation and trust.
During this presentation, Ward Coessens, ThoughtWorks' Consultant will share best practice insights from the Daimler partnership, helping the automotive group on their cloud innovation journey.
How to create more business impact with flexible teams - Jan Hegewald, Zalando & Rebekka Beels, Zalando
Usually, Software Engineering teams are organized around a fixed set of components which they develop further and maintain. Such component teams gain a high level of expert knowledge about their services. However, with agile product development, it often is difficult to implement the most important initiatives with such teams. This leads to a situation where the teams do not work on the most relevant business topics but on those for the respective team. At Zalando, we introduced a new model where we shape teams flexibly around business goals to create the highest impact. How we organize these teams and which challenges especially for the software quality need to be addressed, will be explored in this talk.
Amazon’s Culture of Innovation & The Working Backwards session
Working Backwards; leading organisations achieve growth by marrying customer-obsession with a modern technology strategy. Where do you begin? By focusing on the customer.
During this webinar, Amazon will discuss key innovation principles which have been instrumental in their continued success and their Working Backwards approach.
Dual-Track Agile for Discovery & Development - Adriana Katrandzhieva
The talk will focus on one of the ways teams can ensure continuous delivery and design in their projects. The so-called ‘Dual-track’ model shows the parallel tracks of discovery and development throughout the product design and delivery process. These continually feedback into each other informing new hypothesis that can be tested in order to be proven/disproven. This model is not always easy to implement out of the box and so I will share my own experiences in applying it in practice - what worked, what didn't and how the model can be adjusted to fit different teams and organisational environments.
This document discusses developer experience (DX) and how to design for it. It begins with introductions of the presenters and defines DX as the experience developers have when using a product. It then discusses understanding developer pain points and personas, designing the developer journey, and using different interfaces like APIs, portals, and CLIs. The document outlines challenges in the design process like getting buy-in and measuring DX metrics. It argues that improving DX benefits business goals like enabling experiments, increasing flexibility, and attracting talent. It concludes that developers are also users and designers, and that DX is important to consider for business reasons.
When we design together - Sabrina Mach, Ammara Gafoor and James Emmott
From three distinct perspectives, this talk will contend that design is an activity undertaken by everyone in a software development team. It occurs throughout the process of delivery — not only at the beginning or the end — and it is a powerful instrument for learning about and adapting to the problems our work seeks to solve, which is a shared responsibility. Making the best use of our multidisciplinary expertise in the activity of design requires forms of collaboration that are too often disrupted by the role-based silos that keep us separated and weaken the valuable contribution our diverse approaches could make to our collective efforts. If you care about accelerating time to market, improving customer experience, or building happy and productive teams, you will want to know why and how it matters that we believe ‘design is in everything that we do’.
Hardware is hard(er): designing for distributed user experiences in IoT - Claire Rowland, www.clairerowland.com
Designing connected devices and hardware-enabled services is significantly more complex than pure software. There are more devices on which code can run, connectivity and data sharing patterns to consider, and often multiple and varied touchpoints for users to interact with. Pulling this all together into a coherent experience involves strong collaboration between design and engineering, and a systems thinking approach to UX. In this talk, we’ll introduce what designers need to know about the tech, what engineers need to know about UX for IoT, and how to facilitate the whole-collaboration needed to create great products.
www.clairerowland.com
Customer-centric innovation enabled by cloudThoughtworks
Working Backwards - Leading organisations achieve growth by marrying customer-obsession with a modern technology strategy. In this upcoming webinar, we’ve partnered with AWS to bring you exclusive insights from one of the world’s most innovative companies, Amazon.
The document discusses Amazon's culture of innovation. It emphasizes starting with the customer and working backwards to develop solutions. Amazon focuses on small, autonomous teams that are nimble and own their work. The company's leadership principles guide decision-making and encourage inventiveness, customer obsession, high standards, and long-term thinking to solve customer problems.
The document discusses techniques for establishing shorter feedback loops between developing features and measuring user behavior, including:
1) Shadow traffic which runs new and old features simultaneously to get early feedback without users noticing a difference.
2) Visual reports which assess the quality of a feature through a report (e.g. HTML page) of key metrics.
3) A/B testing which statistically compares user behavior between a control and test group after exposing each to a different variant of a feature. Sample size considerations and statistical significance are discussed.
As a tech leader at ThoughtWorks, a large part of my job involves recommending practices to our clients so they can build and deliver good quality software faster. In doing so repeatedly for many clients I have created a toolkit that contains practical advice from being on the ground. This is what we do, we know it works. When Julius Caesar entered Rome with his army by crossing the river Rubicon, he did something that couldn’t be undone ever again. In your journey as a leader, avoid mistakes that are difficult to correct later. Here are a set of practices that you want to adopt as soon as possible.
Handling error conditions is a core part of the software we write. However, we often treat it as a second class citizen, obscuring our intent through abuse of null values and exceptions that make our code hard to understand and maintain. In the functional programming community, it is common to use datatypes such as Option, Either or Validated to make our intentions explicit when dealing with errors. We can leverage the compiler to verify that we are handling them instead of hoping for the best at runtime. This results in code that is clearer, without hidden path flows. We’ll show how we have been doing this in Kotlin, with the help of the Arrow library.
Mutation testing in software development surfaced in academia during the 70's and has recently seen a resurgence in popularity as a legitimate tool in your testing arsenal. In this session we review the conventional testing pyramid, modern approaches to testing software and look at how mutation testing can help fill in those blind spots.
The document discusses security challenges and best practices for Docker containers. It outlines risks at different stages of the container lifecycle from image development to deployment. Key risks include lack of isolation, complex ecosystems, and known vulnerabilities. The document recommends practices like using linting and scanning during development, restricting resources and access controls at deployment, and signing images from trusted sources to improve container security.
Mainframes handle 30 billion business transactions each day and 87% of all credit card transactions*, they are not traditionally associated with flexible, fail-fast development approaches. Can we bring the practices of agile, CI/CD and fully automated deployments to applications running on a mainframe? During our talk, we'll tell you a story about test automation; redefining the smallest testable unit of a program. And we'll discuss our learnings from introducing continuous integration and agile practices to the world of insurance and mainframes.
*9 Mainframe statistics that may surprise you
ThoughtWorks' Lucy Kurian, James Lewis & Kief Morris discuss tech trends in our latest Technology Radar, covering techniques, platforms, tools, languages and frameworks.
The document discusses the benefits of exercise for mental health. Regular physical activity can help reduce anxiety and depression and improve mood and cognitive functioning. Exercise boosts blood flow, releases endorphins, and promotes changes in the brain which help regulate emotions and stress levels.
The document discusses the benefits of exercise for mental health. Regular physical activity can help reduce anxiety and depression and improve mood and cognitive function. Exercise causes chemical changes in the brain that may help protect against mental illness and improve symptoms.
Do No Harm: Do Technologists Need a Code of Ethics?Thoughtworks
Nothing is neutral, and the technology we design and build, isn’t objective. How do we ensure that what starts out as a great idea, doesn’t unintentionally (or intentionally) harm? Trolling, racially biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, how do we assess our creations through an ethical lens so our products don’t amplify social biases? Do we need a code of ethics? How do we build ethics in our practice?
In this talk Sofia explores these questions and builds on the conversations that are happening globally within the technology community. She also talks about the Responsible Tech Playbook that ThoughtWorks is building which collate ethical frameworks and explore how to use them in design and delivery of software.
SPEAKER:
Sofia Woods, Senior Experience Designer, ThoughtWorks
Sofia has over 10 years experience solving complex problems and designing digital products, experiences and services across government, financial services, transport and the private sectors. She’s a multi-disciplined designer, experienced with the whole gamut of Human Centred Design approaches including UX research, user interface design, prototyping/ testing and can apply this approach in large scale software delivery environments. Blending human centred design with strategy and technology, she creates meaningful experiences that transform.
inQuba Webinar Mastering Customer Journey Management with Dr Graham HillLizaNolte
HERE IS YOUR WEBINAR CONTENT! 'Mastering Customer Journey Management with Dr. Graham Hill'. We hope you find the webinar recording both insightful and enjoyable.
In this webinar, we explored essential aspects of Customer Journey Management and personalization. Here’s a summary of the key insights and topics discussed:
Key Takeaways:
Understanding the Customer Journey: Dr. Hill emphasized the importance of mapping and understanding the complete customer journey to identify touchpoints and opportunities for improvement.
Personalization Strategies: We discussed how to leverage data and insights to create personalized experiences that resonate with customers.
Technology Integration: Insights were shared on how inQuba’s advanced technology can streamline customer interactions and drive operational efficiency.
Discover top-tier mobile app development services, offering innovative solutions for iOS and Android. Enhance your business with custom, user-friendly mobile applications.
zkStudyClub - LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Application...Alex Pruden
Folding is a recent technique for building efficient recursive SNARKs. Several elegant folding protocols have been proposed, such as Nova, Supernova, Hypernova, Protostar, and others. However, all of them rely on an additively homomorphic commitment scheme based on discrete log, and are therefore not post-quantum secure. In this work we present LatticeFold, the first lattice-based folding protocol based on the Module SIS problem. This folding protocol naturally leads to an efficient recursive lattice-based SNARK and an efficient PCD scheme. LatticeFold supports folding low-degree relations, such as R1CS, as well as high-degree relations, such as CCS. The key challenge is to construct a secure folding protocol that works with the Ajtai commitment scheme. The difficulty, is ensuring that extracted witnesses are low norm through many rounds of folding. We present a novel technique using the sumcheck protocol to ensure that extracted witnesses are always low norm no matter how many rounds of folding are used. Our evaluation of the final proof system suggests that it is as performant as Hypernova, while providing post-quantum security.
Paper Link: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/257
This talk will cover ScyllaDB Architecture from the cluster-level view and zoom in on data distribution and internal node architecture. In the process, we will learn the secret sauce used to get ScyllaDB's high availability and superior performance. We will also touch on the upcoming changes to ScyllaDB architecture, moving to strongly consistent metadata and tablets.
Main news related to the CCS TSI 2023 (2023/1695)Jakub Marek
An English 🇬🇧 translation of a presentation to the speech I gave about the main changes brought by CCS TSI 2023 at the biggest Czech conference on Communications and signalling systems on Railways, which was held in Clarion Hotel Olomouc from 7th to 9th November 2023 (konferenceszt.cz). Attended by around 500 participants and 200 on-line followers.
The original Czech 🇨🇿 version of the presentation can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/hlavni-novinky-souvisejici-s-ccs-tsi-2023-2023-1695/269688092 .
The videorecording (in Czech) from the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/WzjJWm4IyPk?si=SImb06tuXGb30BEH .
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/temporal-event-neural-networks-a-more-efficient-alternative-to-the-transformer-a-presentation-from-brainchip/
Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at BrainChip , presents the “Temporal Event Neural Networks: A More Efficient Alternative to the Transformer” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
The expansion of AI services necessitates enhanced computational capabilities on edge devices. Temporal Event Neural Networks (TENNs), developed by BrainChip, represent a novel and highly efficient state-space network. TENNs demonstrate exceptional proficiency in handling multi-dimensional streaming data, facilitating advancements in object detection, action recognition, speech enhancement and language model/sequence generation. Through the utilization of polynomial-based continuous convolutions, TENNs streamline models, expedite training processes and significantly diminish memory requirements, achieving notable reductions of up to 50x in parameters and 5,000x in energy consumption compared to prevailing methodologies like transformers.
Integration with BrainChip’s Akida neuromorphic hardware IP further enhances TENNs’ capabilities, enabling the realization of highly capable, portable and passively cooled edge devices. This presentation delves into the technical innovations underlying TENNs, presents real-world benchmarks, and elucidates how this cutting-edge approach is positioned to revolutionize edge AI across diverse applications.
Your One-Stop Shop for Python Success: Top 10 US Python Development Providersakankshawande
Simplify your search for a reliable Python development partner! This list presents the top 10 trusted US providers offering comprehensive Python development services, ensuring your project's success from conception to completion.
Have you ever been confused by the myriad of choices offered by AWS for hosting a website or an API?
Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Amplify, S3 (and more!) can each host websites + APIs. But which one should we choose?
Which one is cheapest? Which one is fastest? Which one will scale to meet our needs?
Join me in this session as we dive into each AWS hosting service to determine which one is best for your scenario and explain why!
AppSec PNW: Android and iOS Application Security with MobSFAjin Abraham
Mobile Security Framework - MobSF is a free and open source automated mobile application security testing environment designed to help security engineers, researchers, developers, and penetration testers to identify security vulnerabilities, malicious behaviours and privacy concerns in mobile applications using static and dynamic analysis. It supports all the popular mobile application binaries and source code formats built for Android and iOS devices. In addition to automated security assessment, it also offers an interactive testing environment to build and execute scenario based test/fuzz cases against the application.
This talk covers:
Using MobSF for static analysis of mobile applications.
Interactive dynamic security assessment of Android and iOS applications.
Solving Mobile app CTF challenges.
Reverse engineering and runtime analysis of Mobile malware.
How to shift left and integrate MobSF/mobsfscan SAST and DAST in your build pipeline.
The Microsoft 365 Migration Tutorial For Beginner.pptxoperationspcvita
This presentation will help you understand the power of Microsoft 365. However, we have mentioned every productivity app included in Office 365. Additionally, we have suggested the migration situation related to Office 365 and how we can help you.
You can also read: https://www.systoolsgroup.com/updates/office-365-tenant-to-tenant-migration-step-by-step-complete-guide/
5th LF Energy Power Grid Model Meet-up SlidesDanBrown980551
5th Power Grid Model Meet-up
It is with great pleasure that we extend to you an invitation to the 5th Power Grid Model Meet-up, scheduled for 6th June 2024. This event will adopt a hybrid format, allowing participants to join us either through an online Mircosoft Teams session or in person at TU/e located at Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven, Netherlands. The meet-up will be hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), a research university specializing in engineering science & technology.
Power Grid Model
The global energy transition is placing new and unprecedented demands on Distribution System Operators (DSOs). Alongside upgrades to grid capacity, processes such as digitization, capacity optimization, and congestion management are becoming vital for delivering reliable services.
Power Grid Model is an open source project from Linux Foundation Energy and provides a calculation engine that is increasingly essential for DSOs. It offers a standards-based foundation enabling real-time power systems analysis, simulations of electrical power grids, and sophisticated what-if analysis. In addition, it enables in-depth studies and analysis of the electrical power grid’s behavior and performance. This comprehensive model incorporates essential factors such as power generation capacity, electrical losses, voltage levels, power flows, and system stability.
Power Grid Model is currently being applied in a wide variety of use cases, including grid planning, expansion, reliability, and congestion studies. It can also help in analyzing the impact of renewable energy integration, assessing the effects of disturbances or faults, and developing strategies for grid control and optimization.
What to expect
For the upcoming meetup we are organizing, we have an exciting lineup of activities planned:
-Insightful presentations covering two practical applications of the Power Grid Model.
-An update on the latest advancements in Power Grid -Model technology during the first and second quarters of 2024.
-An interactive brainstorming session to discuss and propose new feature requests.
-An opportunity to connect with fellow Power Grid Model enthusiasts and users.
Northern Engraving | Modern Metal Trim, Nameplates and Appliance PanelsNorthern Engraving
What began over 115 years ago as a supplier of precision gauges to the automotive industry has evolved into being an industry leader in the manufacture of product branding, automotive cockpit trim and decorative appliance trim. Value-added services include in-house Design, Engineering, Program Management, Test Lab and Tool Shops.
Must Know Postgres Extension for DBA and Developer during MigrationMydbops
Mydbops Opensource Database Meetup 16
Topic: Must-Know PostgreSQL Extensions for Developers and DBAs During Migration
Speaker: Deepak Mahto, Founder of DataCloudGaze Consulting
Date & Time: 8th June | 10 AM - 1 PM IST
Venue: Bangalore International Centre, Bangalore
Abstract: Discover how PostgreSQL extensions can be your secret weapon! This talk explores how key extensions enhance database capabilities and streamline the migration process for users moving from other relational databases like Oracle.
Key Takeaways:
* Learn about crucial extensions like oracle_fdw, pgtt, and pg_audit that ease migration complexities.
* Gain valuable strategies for implementing these extensions in PostgreSQL to achieve license freedom.
* Discover how these key extensions can empower both developers and DBAs during the migration process.
* Don't miss this chance to gain practical knowledge from an industry expert and stay updated on the latest open-source database trends.
Mydbops Managed Services specializes in taking the pain out of database management while optimizing performance. Since 2015, we have been providing top-notch support and assistance for the top three open-source databases: MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL.
Our team offers a wide range of services, including assistance, support, consulting, 24/7 operations, and expertise in all relevant technologies. We help organizations improve their database's performance, scalability, efficiency, and availability.
Contact us: info@mydbops.com
Visit: https://www.mydbops.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/mydbops
For more details and updates, please follow up the below links.
Meetup Page : https://www.meetup.com/mydbops-databa...
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The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) invited Taylor Paschal, Knowledge & Information Management Consultant at Enterprise Knowledge, to speak at a Knowledge Management Lunch and Learn hosted on June 12, 2024. All Office of Administration staff were invited to attend and received professional development credit for participating in the voluntary event.
The objectives of the Lunch and Learn presentation were to:
- Review what KM ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’
- Understand the value of KM and the benefits of engaging
- Define and reflect on your “what’s in it for me?”
- Share actionable ways you can participate in Knowledge - - Capture & Transfer
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
4. To my mind, the question that’s much more
important than how to control a software
project is, why on earth are we doing so many
projects that deliver such marginal value?
- Tom DeMarco, July 2009
7. The illusion of control in IT projects
I’d strongly suggest that we
pick a date to catalyse our
efforts and hold ourselves
accountable to delivering
full scope on budget. It will
be a rallying call for
all of us and
something to shift our culture
to holding deliverables to
deadlines.
10. Agile’s ultra-transparency invites critique
4 days
Initiation
Prep
Develop and
Test
(usually 2
weeks)
Release
Idea
Detailed Product
Design
17
days
Concept to Cash
Average Cycle Time from Initiation to Release: 78 days!
25% of this time is spent actually creating value. The rest
is waste.
Often there is an additional 2 weeks after deployment
before advertisements generate cash.
18. Three stories about Agile..
1
Agile and the
Beast
2
Agile‟s Adventures
in Wonderland
3
The Wizard of
Agile
19. Agile and The Beast
PMOs and the „G‟ word..
How much governance does a self-directed,
self-organising project team need ?..
20. Agile and The Beast
Don‟t you know who I am.. ?!
The role of the PMO has to change..
21. Agile and The Beast
Don‟t you know who I am.. ?!
How can a PMO compete with this ?
22. Agile‟s Adventures in Wonderland
What about the people.. ?
It‟s a truly wonderful place,
but requires people to be, well,
different..
23. The Wizard of Agile
What about the risk.. ?
Actually, Agile is all about risk mitigation..
24. The Wizard of Agile
“Audit says no”
The intent of an audit is to assess if
you did what you said you would do..
25. In the end..
You Say..
I Say..
In Agile, it‟s just different, that‟s all..
Bridging the gap is easier than you might
think !
Editor's Notes
HISTORYAgile or iterative software development has been around since the 1960s and throughout the 60s and 70s various people were experimenting with ways to improve the way software was delivered. Interestingly, some of the earliest work in iterative and incremental software delivery was done at IBM and NASA, so hardly small companies!The Waterfall model of software delivery was a response to the ad hoc ‘code and fix’ practices of the early days (60s) that lacked rigour and controls. Interestingly, if you study the history of the rise to prominence of waterfall delivery practices, you find that many of the papers and standards used to support them are actually much more luke warm than they seem. This includes the US Department of Defence standards that were seen as the model to follow by other large organisations, and the famous paper by Winston Royce in 1970 that outlines the what became the basis of the waterfall methodology.In his book “Agile & Iterative Development”, Craig Larman refers to this as the Historical Accident of Waterfall Delivery.The dominance of waterfall style governance of projects really came into its own in the 90s, in response to the increasing proportion of failed software projects. It was seen as the control methodology that could get things back on track. We hoped that stricter governance could put a lid on these spiralling failure rates.The thing about waterfall delivery and the governance that surrounds it is that it sounds like it ‘should’ work. On paper it makes sense. It is simple and linear, whereas agile iterative development is more complex to understand. But we are delivering projects in the real world, and real world issues get in the way of well crafted simple plans every time.PICTURE – IBM AN/FSQ-7 was by far the largest computer ever built, and is expected to hold that record. It consisted of two complete Whirlwind II computers installed in a 4-story building Each AN/FSQ supported more than 100 users. IBM had about 60 employees at each site for round-the-clock maintenance.Keeping one unit operating and one on hot standby (to allow for switchover when vacuum tubes failed) resulted in better than 99% uptime. The roles of the two units were reversed at regular intervals, allowing diagnostics and maintenance to be carried out on the standby unit. There were usually several hundred tube failures each day, replaced by workers racing up and down the tube racks with shopping carts full of replacements. Automated tests run by the computer itself would cycle the voltage to the tube racks down and back up to induce marginal tubes to fail early, so that the computer would normally run correctly for the rest of the day. Without this process, the MTBF would have been a few minutes. By the time SAGE was deployed (22 or 23 stations in the period 1959-1963; sources disagree) it was nearly obsolete, since it was designed to detect bombers, not the new ICBMs. Nevertheless it was operational until 1979,
ILLUSIONSingle pass waterfall delivery gives the illusion of orderly, predictable, accountable and measureable process, with easy to define milestones that can be defined by simple deliverables (e.g. requirements document complete). “Plan the work, work the plan”The problem is that this is an illusion.For example, using a gating process to allocate money to a project creates an illusion of less risk at each stage as you are achieving a ‘milestone’ before more money is handed out. And you are assessing the progress of the project at each gate. The trouble is that in reality what actually happens is no-one is ever brave enough to cancel a project where several hundred thousands of $$ have been spent and the only thing we have to show for it is a couple of documents and some code that isn’t integrated with anything. The numbers are fudged at each ‘gate’ because no-one can bear the idea of so much lost money.Contrast this to an agile project where working software is delivered every few weeks. If a project is deemed to no longer be worth spending money on, you at least have something to show for all your hard work. The ‘milestones’ on agile projects are not documents, but working software that delivers value to the business.As an example, I was the project manager last year on a project for a TW client that was cut short for financial reasons at the beginning of the global financial crisis. We were part of a programme of work consisting of half a dozen projects, of which ours was the only one using agile. The other projects were all abandoned with nothing delivered, whereas our project was able to go live a few weeks later with only a small amount of additional money spent on the various deployment processes required in the large organisation. TW Australia has been involved in many similar stories over the years.
CONTROL & VALUETell story about TomDeMarco change of heart on control.Another problem is that we are often trying to control the wrong things. Software projects are not business as usual processes. Measuring timesheet data, amount of money spent, and how we are progressing against a schedule doesn’t actually tell us much about how we are progressing in our goal to deliver valuable working software. These questions tell us how the project is proceeding, not whether or not it will be successful.Instead we should be focussing on:Are there any changes in objectives or scope?Has the benefits model changed?QualityIs the backlog of scope items appropriately prioritised by business value?Are the project risks being managed?Are stakeholder involvement & comms being managed?These are the measures that will tell us whether or not the project is on a successful path.Tom De Marco bioAdd more here for my benefitPeopleWare & Waltzing With BearsWinner of 1986 Warnier Prize for “lifetime contribution to the field of software development”“The best bang-per-buck risk mitigation strategy we know is incremental delivery” – from Waltzing With Bears (De Marco & Tim Lister)
VISIBILITYOne of the main differences between agile governance and governance in more traditional project structures is VISIBILITY.Agile project delivery methodologies use highly visible tracking mechanisms such as: story walls, stand-ups, burnup charts, showcases, etc. These visible trackers are available for anyone associated with the project to see at any time, and provide real time data. There is nowhere to hide with agile.Compare this to a waterfall project. Reports on progress are made to the steering committee and sponsor by the project manager. They therefore only reflect one person’s view of the project – one person’s fiction (whether intentionally or not). You can say or not say anything that suits your needs. The same applies to the gantt chart, which rarely reflects what anyone truly believes will happen (why it is sometimes know as the “can’t chart’).
<0.5 minute slide> Hernando Cortes in Mexico in 1519. There are other routes (see Josh)! You might think agile was natural to a bunch of hippies – sort of ‘culturally appropriate’ in a way. Truth is LP came to agile in a very hard nosed fashion. Show the Vignette clock.
<3 minutes> Gladwell’s New Yorker speech on the GFC and the illusion of control (the stockbroker example; incompetence vs overconfidence). Governance is no longer ‘rules for losing’, it is operational transparency, accountability and responsibility. Transparency on the card walls; accountability on estimates; responsibility for quality via broken builds (red lights). How do we get to believe that waterfall = watertight?
<2 minutes> Standups, cards, pair programming, embrace change, retros, speed dating, poker, Fibonacci 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. We’re moving the finance guy to sit just to the left of this wall. Other examples: GIS implementation; SAP enhancements; New book design (6 mths to 6 wks)
<1 minute> Catches bugs, design better, code shorter, problem solving, learning, shared understanding, communication, enjoyment. Costs 15% more – repaid in shorter testing, less QA staff, and ongoing support costs. Not compatible with seagull product management – reveals weaknesses with a delivery every 2 weeks. Reminder – people don’t learn in a waterfall fashion.
<3 minutes> What’s the velocity of your end of month finance reporting? The day the LP chef asked me why we only managed 18 points in the last release was a watershed. But it doesn’t stop people sniping from the sidelines without engaging – walk them round the boards regularly. Also apply lean thinking to the software delivery process.
<0.5 minute> Ford 6 times a day = crisis; Toyota = 27,000 time a day at Toyota City. You’ll need deviants to make this work.
<2 minutes> Explain the comfort lawyers and CEOs have with contracts, and the changes we had to make to our MSAs and work orders! Depreciation rules cause problems – ‘build, freeze the asset, depreciate’ actually defies reality that 80% of the costs of owning s/w is in the production period.Accountants get very excited about our metrics (eg $/point) – use them to write ‘rules for losing’. Tell story of the CFO calling the website launch a ‘fail’, was not part of the prioritisation that sent various cards to the bottom of the pile.The best bang-per-buck risk mitigation strategy we know is incremental delivery” – from Waltzing With Bears (De Marco & Tim Lister)
<2 minutes> Lean, agile and ITIL (sdm, change and release), talent, process … it’s about who has lunch with whom. Ask yourself why ITIL works a lot more than software development?
<0.5 minute slide>
<3 minutes> Acid test for Lonely Planet agile (this and using it to make books). TW as Partners, longitude on our side. The daily rhythm working to your advantage. Lean = send them your best person, the one it really hurts to lose. Then standups, cards, prioritisation, ops in the room.
HandoverThank you NigelCan a large, corporate environment really sustain a dynamic, highly interactive way of working ? Surely, as most corporates tend to orientate around mitigating risk to the n’th degree through too much process and too much consistency, the creativity and freedom Agile engenders is severely restricted ?<Next>
Suncorp is a large corporate (17,000 people or so..)Our business technology team is about 1,400 permanent peopleWe’re trans-Tasman and work in a distributed environmentFor those uninitiated, the 2007 acquisition of the Promina Group by Suncorp resulted in a significant integration programOut of this, the business technology team was a fusion of nine pre-merger groupsAgile was to be the common binding cultural framework, with explicit encouragement from our Executive Leaders, particularly our Group Executive, to ‘make it happen’For the overwhelming majority of us in business technology, it was a new way of workingOur application of Agile certainly picks up all of the development approaches for which it has become well regardedBut at Suncorp, our application of Agile is broader, covering a value set, principles and practices. Challengingly for a large corporate, the principles include Speed, Flexibility and Simplicity !A transformation of this scale, considered in the context of a large, corporate entity, could have died a painful death.At Suncorp Business Technology, we have been on this Agile journey for two years now, momentum has been maintained and our capabilities continue to mature.So what lessons can I share about introducing Agile to a large corporate, with particular emphasis on the typical corporate pain-points of project governance ?<Next>
I have three stories to share with you.I will be starting with Agile and the Beast; all about PMOs and GovernanceI will then talk about Agile’s Adventures in Wonderland – a place where all the people are different !And lastly,The Wizard of Agile; a tale of fear, myths and self-discovery (and maybe even a pair of red shoes) involving Risk, Compliance and Audit<Next>
PMO and Governance..I think PMOs and the project governance frameworks they foster are living.Divide and multiply, divide and multiply – These things just grow. Every ‘incident’ translates to a fresh raft of ‘improvements’.I must admit that having, as I do, a PMO background, I love a good framework.But I’ve had to seriously revisit what needs to be in a project governance framework.My new catch-cry is ‘light yet sufficient’ – in everything.Suncorp has a corporate project governance framework that all projects must align to; but it’s not overly prescriptive. It has minimum-mandatories like there should be a compelling business case to make the investment. That there should be some defined, accountable governance roles aligning with our organisational structure (like a steering committee) if we’re to spend the big bucks.But this is not a detailed, checklist type framework. And as a PMO leader in Business Technology, I don’t feel compelled to overlay an additional level of governance across the project space.I understand that Agile projects at Suncorp are different. I appreciate that the business and technology folk are closely entwined and challenging what they’re doing every day. I have confidence that when something looks a bit off, we investigate why, we have a conversation. Mostly though, I marvel at how the self-organising teams employ structure and governance that’s fit for their context – if I was a PM, that’s how I would want it to be !
So how does the PMO, historically a control function, respond to such challenge ?I find it’s now less about mandating adherence to standards and more about understanding the decisions that need to be made and providing the best information I have available to make those decisions.The best place for a PMO to start is to ruthlessly challenge what they are doing; ask how does this add value and for whom ?I know there have been some instances where I have been unable to answer these questions, so the process and/or report in question gets turned off, or replaced with something simpler and more streamlined.For the PMO, it’s about finding new ways to add value to their executive stakeholders.
But if for no other reason, the PMO needs to change because of this !In all honesty, as a PMO manager how can I compete with the richness of this experience. With an Executive leadership team who can read and interpret such a story wall, a little status indicator doesn’t quite cut it ? By the time I consolidate a report, our Group Exec can visit the project, talk with the project team, remove obstacles and has moved on to assist the next project.So it changes the nature of my role.Add to this the social networking, micro-blogging and collaboration sites and I’m fighting a losing battle. People in Business Technology promote their own good work and learnings themselves; I get pointers from the Exec team about what needs to be in our monthly performance reporting before I even start to piece it together.PMOs need to move beyond process-centricity and embrace a more relationship-led model of gathering management information.
Agile truly is another world. It’s got it’s own postcode.So what can impede an organisation as it attempts to transition to Agile like nothing else ? It’s People !I believe corporate hierarchy to be the last bastion of change resistance. So even if you tackle the governance elements to enable a move to Agile, there are some other places where resistance may impede your efforts.The Project ManagerNot just running the schedule and whipping the team into the ground anymore ! The performance of the team becomes particularly important, as is the mood of the team. So some of the ‘softer’ leadership competencies become all the more necessary. Project Managers as people leaders.. How many of your PMs have that ability ?The Team MemberIt’s pretty confronting in an Agile team. Every day, the project stand-up is a very public forum where lack of delivery becomes very noticeable. Not everyone will embrace that – initially.. !The PartnerTypical arrangements where delivery partners have grown fat and tasty on a time and materials basis need to be judiciously assessed. Pick the right partner to help you on your Agile journey, one who shares your values and has the right motivations.The ManagerSenior Leaders cast long shadows and may resist initial efforts to changeAgile projects need rapid, timely decisions to maintain pace. They tend to get on and do just that – they are self-directed.Senior Managers have long played a role of the decision maker in project delivery. Whilst their oversight is required from a governance perspective, most notably via steering committees, they are more valuable as true leaders; removing obstacles for the team, providing guidance and finding more resources. This includes expertise and experience that they can bring to the Project Teams as stakeholders –not as ‘the’ lone decision maker !Watch for other management dysfunctions too, such as proxy project management, corridor interventions, pressure for improved performance (velocity) and pressure for ‘accurate’ estimates.
The final area I would like to talk about are the Risk, Compliance and Audit functions.Risk and Compliance functions in the corporate enterprise have the unenviable role of identifying systemic risks and the areas of non-compliance to ever-changing regulations, then intervening to prevent said risk becoming a big issue !How does Agile help to manage risk ?Each story is tied to discrete business value; we know what we’re doing every step of the way.We then assess the relative risks of each story – so it’s very comprehensive.. !Agile projects are structured to tackle the riskiest components first. This approach tests our assumptions up-front and we get much clearer on the success potential of a project.If something is just not going to work and will fail, then we want it to fail fast and fail cheaply. In this context, failure is as good outcome.. !Lastly, iterations also help with the changing business environment including legislative change, we can be flexible and responsive.So if you were a risk manager, would you like Agile ?Our experience suggests that whatever requirements are made by the risk and compliance functions, our Agile projects can respond with appropriate structure and rigour.<Next>
What is it about the word ‘audit’ that strikes fear into the heart of a project manger ?I recall the apprehension of wondering, what are our auditors going to make of this ? Sure, Agile works well in those neat web applications that exist outside of the highly regulated Australian Financial Services industry; but surely, here’s where we’re going to come unstuck ?You know what, both Suncorp internal and external audit teams were really keen to understand ‘Agile’ and how it would lend itself for review.So our internal and external audit teams participated together in an Agile training session tailored for them. We then worked with the audit team to translate their checklists into an Agile context.This is still very much an education journey. Executive support was needed was when audit was first engaged. Fully seized of the myths around an Agile approach, we needed to counter the initial response of “doesn’t Agile introduce greater risk ?” and concerns about how to audit a project that has “no documentation”. Whilst bottom up support was there, we needed backing from our leaders to lend credibility. That education journey continues.I would still say that most PMs still fear the audit teams (some would say this is healthy !) but fundamentally, there is no disconnect in terms of adopting Agile in a corporate from an audit perspective.
So in the end, to a great degree it comes down to changing your context.Agile projects still have project charters, release plans and test plans. They may not have big, chunky requirements documents and we may not tack on a three month ‘big up-front design’ phase so everyone can prod and poke the thing to see if it will fly, but there is structure, rigour and discipline.You just have to learn a new lingo.Every Agile journey is different. Every organisation will adapt Agile to meet it’s specific needs.But I believe that Agile can be effective, irrespective of the size of the organisation.I come from a hardened PMO background and would not try to replicate what I’ve done before now that I’ve been introduced to Agile. To be totally frank, I find it not only easier to work Agile but so much more stimulating !I appreciate that having an Executive Sponsored Agile Change Program is somewhat of a unique situation. But I am adamant that what I have stepped through today is possible in any context;You can question your governance frameworksYou can challenge your PMO to simplify and streamline – ask where the value is !You can look to change the way you work and what you expect from your team membersYou can work with your audit teams to help them understand Agile (and support you to adopt it !)These are not always easy areas to tackle, in fact far from it, these elements need to be challenged if you are contemplating the Agile way of working. But they are well worth pursuing !Thank you.HandoverI will now hand over to Lindy who is going to share some suggestions about how to start an Agile transformation in your own organisation.
CHANGEToday we’re talking about how to adapt your companies governance in order to support agile project delivery. But perhaps you’re not lucky enough to work for an organisation that is interested in making these changes. Can you still deliver individual projects in an agile way? Of course you can, TW works with clients doing this all the time. But you will lose some of the benefits.For example, it can be time consuming for a project manager to convert the sort of data that comes out of an agile project into a proscribed template. And hard to align agile project deliverables with traditional funding milestones. The main impacts of this are usually a time overhead for the PM, the need for extra communication and potential loss of productivity of the team waiting for ‘gates’.But what can you do in your organisation to start to bring about some of the changes we are talking about today? How can you influence the gate keepers?One of the best ways to highlight the fallacies associated with traditional governance is to encourage better post project reviews in your organisation. Focus on true return on investment. Were the benefits in the business case actually realised? Highlight what proportion of the software delivered by your projects is actually useful to the people who use it. Without these measures, it is easy to call a project a ‘success’ based on the fact that it has simply gone live. Value becomes irrelevant. Encourage others around you to see value to the business of the project success criteria, not whether or not the project came in under some budget number handed down from above.By getting people around you to think about what actually constitutes a successful project, you might also start to get them thinking about the best ways to measure that success during the project.