The document summarizes a discussion at the January 2013 Agile:MK user group meeting about a project to develop a cloud-based computing grid platform called MG-ALFA Compute for Azure. A team of 4 developers used agile methods to develop the platform over 2 years. Key aspects included keeping the process simple, frequent design sessions, test-driven development, pair programming, and prioritizing the minimum required features. The platform successfully executed thousands of complex actuarial modeling jobs in the cloud.
The document provides an agenda for an Agile training session hosted by Alexandre Cuva. The agenda includes three sessions: a 45 minute presentation, a 1 hour and 30 minute hands-on session, and a 45 minute retrospective. It also provides biographical information about Alexandre Cuva and his background in Agile coaching and training.
The document summarizes the history of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) from its origins as a Yahoo group created in response to Bruce Tognazzini's call for interaction designers to unite, to its incorporation as a non-profit organization in 2005. Key events included the first leadership retreat that defined IxDA's purpose and goals, building an organizational structure and governance, and announcing IxDA to the interaction design community. The first executive committee and board of directors were also established to lead the new organization.
This document discusses how social media can benefit project management. It begins with an abstract that outlines how communication is key to project success but is changing with new technologies. The author then discusses their experience using social media for a case study project and conference. Specific benefits of social media are summarized for communication, scope, resources, and procurement. The author argues that social media allows for improved and constant communication across virtual teams.
Kuali OLE: Deep Library Collaboration and the Release of a Community-Sourced ...Robert H. McDonald
This document summarizes a presentation about Kuali OLE, an open source library management system created through collaboration between multiple universities. It describes the journey to create a collaborative community to develop the system, including establishing functional councils, technical architecture choices, and community organization. It also discusses plans for deployment, creating an ecosystem of vendors, investing in the community, and expanding globally.
Why leadership development program essential part of a companyAaren Paul
A leadership development program is always important to carry out successful business plans and is the best solution to achieve the desired level of productivity and that is why many companies today think of taking into account.
The document discusses creating and managing LinkedIn groups to build talent communities. It provides guidance on setting up group pages, driving membership, using insights and analytics, and engaging members. Premium options are available for customizing a group's branding and advertising space. Maintaining focused objectives, relevant discussions, and frequent engagement are emphasized as best practices.
Communities of practice (CoPs) are self-governing groups aligned with organizational strategy that share challenges and generate knowledge. The document discusses how to transform ideas into action through CoPs. It provides examples of current CoPs within the organization focused on developing smart TV channels and gamification techniques. Metrics are shown on the number of CoPs, participants, and intrapreneurs in 2013, with the goal of measuring results in 2014. Qualitative critical success factors of CoPs include empowerment, engagement, talent management, transformation, and knowledge management.
The document provides an agenda for an Agile training session hosted by Alexandre Cuva. The agenda includes three sessions: a 45 minute presentation, a 1 hour and 30 minute hands-on session, and a 45 minute retrospective. It also provides biographical information about Alexandre Cuva and his background in Agile coaching and training.
The document summarizes the history of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) from its origins as a Yahoo group created in response to Bruce Tognazzini's call for interaction designers to unite, to its incorporation as a non-profit organization in 2005. Key events included the first leadership retreat that defined IxDA's purpose and goals, building an organizational structure and governance, and announcing IxDA to the interaction design community. The first executive committee and board of directors were also established to lead the new organization.
This document discusses how social media can benefit project management. It begins with an abstract that outlines how communication is key to project success but is changing with new technologies. The author then discusses their experience using social media for a case study project and conference. Specific benefits of social media are summarized for communication, scope, resources, and procurement. The author argues that social media allows for improved and constant communication across virtual teams.
Kuali OLE: Deep Library Collaboration and the Release of a Community-Sourced ...Robert H. McDonald
This document summarizes a presentation about Kuali OLE, an open source library management system created through collaboration between multiple universities. It describes the journey to create a collaborative community to develop the system, including establishing functional councils, technical architecture choices, and community organization. It also discusses plans for deployment, creating an ecosystem of vendors, investing in the community, and expanding globally.
Why leadership development program essential part of a companyAaren Paul
A leadership development program is always important to carry out successful business plans and is the best solution to achieve the desired level of productivity and that is why many companies today think of taking into account.
The document discusses creating and managing LinkedIn groups to build talent communities. It provides guidance on setting up group pages, driving membership, using insights and analytics, and engaging members. Premium options are available for customizing a group's branding and advertising space. Maintaining focused objectives, relevant discussions, and frequent engagement are emphasized as best practices.
Communities of practice (CoPs) are self-governing groups aligned with organizational strategy that share challenges and generate knowledge. The document discusses how to transform ideas into action through CoPs. It provides examples of current CoPs within the organization focused on developing smart TV channels and gamification techniques. Metrics are shown on the number of CoPs, participants, and intrapreneurs in 2013, with the goal of measuring results in 2014. Qualitative critical success factors of CoPs include empowerment, engagement, talent management, transformation, and knowledge management.
Marcia Jackson is the Manager of the CI Strategy Group at DTE Energy. She presented on the practical application of the Connections software to promote knowledge sharing across DTE Energy's businesses. The presentation provided an overview of DTE Energy's businesses, employees, and customers. It then described how Connections was piloted with select user groups and rolled out enterprise-wide to address issues with knowledge silos and sharing. Marcia discussed strategies for adoption, including leadership support, training videos, and communities. The goal was to use Connections to connect DTE's over 9,000 employees and facilitate problem solving.
Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Strea...Mike Gotta
Organizations can improve how employees connect to co-workers by understanding the influence design has on participation within social platforms. This session examines key social networking building blocks and how design practices should accommodate multiple networking strategies as employees seek to mobilize their connections to satisfy different work and professional needs.Attendees will gain a better understanding of social networking technology found within social platforms; insight to the cultural aspects of social networks, and how social networking strategies help people cultivate relationships and build social capital they can later leverage to achieve work and professional goals.
Presented at E2.0 Boston June 2012. This version of the deck puts builds on separate slides to display properly on Slideshare.
This document summarizes an upcoming presentation on ethics versus business interests in project management. The presentation will use case studies and examples from professional forums to illustrate common ethical dilemmas project managers may face at different stages of a project's lifecycle. It will also discuss how ethical standards may vary in different regions and industries. The goal is for project managers to learn how to recognize and address potential ethical issues so they are prepared to handle similar situations in the future.
This document discusses managing diverse and geographically dispersed teams. It identifies some of the complexities in managing such teams, including predicting human behavior, cultural diversity, and integration issues. It recommends developing team discipline, using consistent processes and tools, insisting on face-to-face interactions, open communication, objective evaluation, and leveraging team power. Effective leadership, clear objectives, and positive team dynamics like establishing trust and providing recognition are also important. The document provides an example of how not managing a diverse team effectively can lead to conflicts and lack of focus. It concludes that diversity, if well-managed, can produce superior results.
Subscribe: http://www.aipmm.com/subscribe
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/aipmm
Membership: http://www.aipmm.com/join.php
Certification: http://aipmm.com/html/certification
Product Leader Training:
Feb 5&6, 2013 San Francisco, CA
http://www.aipmm.com/html/certification/strategic-innovation.php
Startup Product Summit:
Feb 7, 2013 San Francisco, CA
http://startupproduct.com
Lead2 involves a series of three provocative workshops led by Dame Pat Collarbone to help leadership teams respond to changing contexts. The workshops explore the external environment, effective leadership, and developing capacity at all levels. Participants analyze challenges, identify key leadership skills, and create a plan to develop their people. The goal is to establish a leadership focus to deliver organizational strategy and solutions during times of change.
The document outlines the journey of social collaboration at a company from 2010-2015, starting with pilots involving 1,000 and 5,000 employees and expanding to a mass launch with 20,000 employees. It discusses the value proposition of social collaboration for individuals, teams, managers and organizations, including benefits like faster information sharing, knowledge sharing, and productivity gains. Finally, it addresses challenges like adoption approaches and emphasizes that trust is critical for social collaboration.
The conference programme document summarizes the agenda for an upcoming conference on business psychology. It includes:
1) Four parallel streams covering various topics in psychology and business such as organizational change, new assessment tools, and developing distinctiveness.
2) A schedule of sessions from Thursday to Friday with topics like leadership development, effective communication, and strengths-based selection.
3) A keynote address and workshop on Thursday evening about business psychology opportunities.
4) The conference runs from May 6-8 at a hotel and ends at midday on Saturday.
Design Innovation for Group and Individual VolunteeringRandall Blair
Project was to research youth volunteering using a human centered design lens. By listening to and observing the needs of young volunteers and of the adults that support them in these activities, we can design a system that uses current and emerging technology to facilitate the administration and participation in group volunteering opportunities.
The document provides an overview and roadmap for IBM Lotus Connections. It discusses business imperatives driving increased collaboration, an overview of Lotus Connections 2.5 features including enhanced communities, profiles, activities, and mobile support. It also outlines how Lotus Connections can be extended through integration with other IBM and third party applications. Social software solutions for infusing businesses with collaboration capabilities and driving innovation through customer communities are presented.
The Navigator Institute provides an 18-month training program to develop leaders into "Navigators" who can create alignment and change within organizations. The program teaches skills like personal development, leadership, relationships, conflict resolution, and group alignment. Upon completion, participants who master the skills will be certified as Navigators and able to mobilize others to achieve greater results. The training uses modules, coaching, and practice to overcome barriers and learn how to transform complex systems.
This document summarizes Rachel Happe's presentation on working in complex adaptive systems. It discusses how the pace of technology is accelerating rapidly while human performance is not improving at the same rate. This creates a "perfect storm" as technology and social currents change. Complex adaptive systems are made up of independent agents with boundaries that interact in non-linear ways, creating feedback loops. The document presents examples of Finnish schools and W.L. Gore that take a systems approach to push decision-making to individual agents. The Community Roundtable is introduced as providing training, networking, and research to help organizations succeed in this complex world.
The document discusses factors that attract and retain employees. It describes how Gallup identified 12 key questions through extensive research. These questions measure core elements like knowing what is expected at work, having necessary materials, and receiving recognition. The exact wording of the questions is important for accurately assessing an organization's ability to attract and retain top talent.
Enterprise social networks comprise various elements like tags, expert locators, search capabilities, rich media, documents, projects, events/tasks, people profiles, microblogs, blogs, bookmarks, discussions, and polls. They allow employees to easily share knowledge and collaborate across traditional department and geographic boundaries. The key benefits are improved innovation, speed, scalability, and organizational stability through emergent collaboration and weak ties between distributed employees. To successfully implement enterprise social networks, companies should view it as a change in organizational design rather than just a technology problem, start with a small focused community, and give the network time to develop organically with minimal constraints defined by emergent user behaviors.
The document discusses NASA's assessment of its innovation ecosystem. It found that while NASA has processes to support idea generation and collaboration, like working groups and challenges, these processes are stovepiped and not integrated in a way that facilitates open information sharing and synergistic collaboration across the agency. As a result, NASA lacks transparency and efficiency in managing its innovation pipeline. The assessment concluded that NASA needs an approach to collectively leverage existing processes to encourage collaboration and bring together experts to promote innovative ideas and technologies.
The document discusses the need for radical change to create a more sustainable future through innovation and collaboration between businesses, governments, NGOs, and academia. It proposes that the Renaissance2 platform can help accelerate breakthroughs by connecting organizations and enabling the sharing of knowledge and best practices. The goal is to catalyze transformations in key areas through applying new approaches and mobilizing resources.
This document reflects on leadership development based on conversations with over 1200 executives. It discusses [1] the dynamics of business including shifting powers, uncertainty, and a focus on results; [2] the work and life of executives which involves strong involvement, seeking balance, and super information; and [3] the world of executive development as a profession which faces a crowded arena, broken promises, and questions about new approaches. It concludes that executive development is about performance improvement through initiatives focused on results and challenges faced day to day. Leaders operate as architects and facilitators offer expertise in learning processes.
ALN-Bengaluru - Agile Management - Driving Leadership & Complexity of …Ravi Kumar
This document discusses agile management and the role of managers. It addresses the challenges of applying traditional management approaches to agile software development processes, which are characterized as complex adaptive systems. The document outlines several agile principles and manifestos focused on customer satisfaction, transparency, and self-organizing teams. It also examines different views of management and measurements, and argues future management approaches must focus on people, continuous improvement, and adapting to change rather than only efficiency.
Looking back at 2012. what is coming in 2013 ver0.1LearningCafe
This webinar discusses workplace learning trends for 2013. It provides an overview of the webinar details including date, time, and participation information. The webinar will feature a panel discussion on topics like effective learning, developing the learning profession, and leveraging technology. It will also explore capability development approaches and practitioners' strategic focus. The panelists represent various organizations and will share their observations on trends they have seen in 2012 as well as expectations for 2013.
Duke Energy 4Q/03_Transcript_and_QA_-Finalfinance21
Duke Energy held an earnings call to discuss its financial results for Q4 2003 and the full year. The company reported a net loss of $1.48 per share for 2003, which included $2.76 in special items. Most business segments met their targets except for Franchised Electric, which saw lower earnings due to higher costs. Duke Energy's largest loss was primarily driven by asset impairments and other special charges related to its DENA business. Management provided additional details on special items to help analysts understand the company's ongoing earnings performance excluding these one-time charges.
1. The document discusses efforts to strengthen the local food system in six counties in northeast Iowa by increasing connections between producers, institutions, and consumers.
2. It outlines strategies used such as developing a strategic plan, expanding growing seasons, engaging schools in farm to school programs, and increasing commitments from organizations like colleges to purchase local food.
3. Results so far include increased sales and purchases of local food by producers and institutions between 2007-2009, as well as leveraged funding through grants.
Improving Patient Satisfaction with BellwetherBrian Lee Csp
Bellwether is a tool that enables hospitals to proactively manage HCAHPS feedback in real-time to maximize reimbursement from Value-Based Purchasing. It identifies trends in patient satisfaction early through bedside interviews using configurable question sets. Results are automatically integrated with an accountability system to trigger immediate corrective actions when thresholds are not met. This allows hospitals to shape outcomes before official HCAHPS scores are published, which can negatively impact reimbursement.
Marcia Jackson is the Manager of the CI Strategy Group at DTE Energy. She presented on the practical application of the Connections software to promote knowledge sharing across DTE Energy's businesses. The presentation provided an overview of DTE Energy's businesses, employees, and customers. It then described how Connections was piloted with select user groups and rolled out enterprise-wide to address issues with knowledge silos and sharing. Marcia discussed strategies for adoption, including leadership support, training videos, and communities. The goal was to use Connections to connect DTE's over 9,000 employees and facilitate problem solving.
Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Strea...Mike Gotta
Organizations can improve how employees connect to co-workers by understanding the influence design has on participation within social platforms. This session examines key social networking building blocks and how design practices should accommodate multiple networking strategies as employees seek to mobilize their connections to satisfy different work and professional needs.Attendees will gain a better understanding of social networking technology found within social platforms; insight to the cultural aspects of social networks, and how social networking strategies help people cultivate relationships and build social capital they can later leverage to achieve work and professional goals.
Presented at E2.0 Boston June 2012. This version of the deck puts builds on separate slides to display properly on Slideshare.
This document summarizes an upcoming presentation on ethics versus business interests in project management. The presentation will use case studies and examples from professional forums to illustrate common ethical dilemmas project managers may face at different stages of a project's lifecycle. It will also discuss how ethical standards may vary in different regions and industries. The goal is for project managers to learn how to recognize and address potential ethical issues so they are prepared to handle similar situations in the future.
This document discusses managing diverse and geographically dispersed teams. It identifies some of the complexities in managing such teams, including predicting human behavior, cultural diversity, and integration issues. It recommends developing team discipline, using consistent processes and tools, insisting on face-to-face interactions, open communication, objective evaluation, and leveraging team power. Effective leadership, clear objectives, and positive team dynamics like establishing trust and providing recognition are also important. The document provides an example of how not managing a diverse team effectively can lead to conflicts and lack of focus. It concludes that diversity, if well-managed, can produce superior results.
Subscribe: http://www.aipmm.com/subscribe
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/aipmm
Membership: http://www.aipmm.com/join.php
Certification: http://aipmm.com/html/certification
Product Leader Training:
Feb 5&6, 2013 San Francisco, CA
http://www.aipmm.com/html/certification/strategic-innovation.php
Startup Product Summit:
Feb 7, 2013 San Francisco, CA
http://startupproduct.com
Lead2 involves a series of three provocative workshops led by Dame Pat Collarbone to help leadership teams respond to changing contexts. The workshops explore the external environment, effective leadership, and developing capacity at all levels. Participants analyze challenges, identify key leadership skills, and create a plan to develop their people. The goal is to establish a leadership focus to deliver organizational strategy and solutions during times of change.
The document outlines the journey of social collaboration at a company from 2010-2015, starting with pilots involving 1,000 and 5,000 employees and expanding to a mass launch with 20,000 employees. It discusses the value proposition of social collaboration for individuals, teams, managers and organizations, including benefits like faster information sharing, knowledge sharing, and productivity gains. Finally, it addresses challenges like adoption approaches and emphasizes that trust is critical for social collaboration.
The conference programme document summarizes the agenda for an upcoming conference on business psychology. It includes:
1) Four parallel streams covering various topics in psychology and business such as organizational change, new assessment tools, and developing distinctiveness.
2) A schedule of sessions from Thursday to Friday with topics like leadership development, effective communication, and strengths-based selection.
3) A keynote address and workshop on Thursday evening about business psychology opportunities.
4) The conference runs from May 6-8 at a hotel and ends at midday on Saturday.
Design Innovation for Group and Individual VolunteeringRandall Blair
Project was to research youth volunteering using a human centered design lens. By listening to and observing the needs of young volunteers and of the adults that support them in these activities, we can design a system that uses current and emerging technology to facilitate the administration and participation in group volunteering opportunities.
The document provides an overview and roadmap for IBM Lotus Connections. It discusses business imperatives driving increased collaboration, an overview of Lotus Connections 2.5 features including enhanced communities, profiles, activities, and mobile support. It also outlines how Lotus Connections can be extended through integration with other IBM and third party applications. Social software solutions for infusing businesses with collaboration capabilities and driving innovation through customer communities are presented.
The Navigator Institute provides an 18-month training program to develop leaders into "Navigators" who can create alignment and change within organizations. The program teaches skills like personal development, leadership, relationships, conflict resolution, and group alignment. Upon completion, participants who master the skills will be certified as Navigators and able to mobilize others to achieve greater results. The training uses modules, coaching, and practice to overcome barriers and learn how to transform complex systems.
This document summarizes Rachel Happe's presentation on working in complex adaptive systems. It discusses how the pace of technology is accelerating rapidly while human performance is not improving at the same rate. This creates a "perfect storm" as technology and social currents change. Complex adaptive systems are made up of independent agents with boundaries that interact in non-linear ways, creating feedback loops. The document presents examples of Finnish schools and W.L. Gore that take a systems approach to push decision-making to individual agents. The Community Roundtable is introduced as providing training, networking, and research to help organizations succeed in this complex world.
The document discusses factors that attract and retain employees. It describes how Gallup identified 12 key questions through extensive research. These questions measure core elements like knowing what is expected at work, having necessary materials, and receiving recognition. The exact wording of the questions is important for accurately assessing an organization's ability to attract and retain top talent.
Enterprise social networks comprise various elements like tags, expert locators, search capabilities, rich media, documents, projects, events/tasks, people profiles, microblogs, blogs, bookmarks, discussions, and polls. They allow employees to easily share knowledge and collaborate across traditional department and geographic boundaries. The key benefits are improved innovation, speed, scalability, and organizational stability through emergent collaboration and weak ties between distributed employees. To successfully implement enterprise social networks, companies should view it as a change in organizational design rather than just a technology problem, start with a small focused community, and give the network time to develop organically with minimal constraints defined by emergent user behaviors.
The document discusses NASA's assessment of its innovation ecosystem. It found that while NASA has processes to support idea generation and collaboration, like working groups and challenges, these processes are stovepiped and not integrated in a way that facilitates open information sharing and synergistic collaboration across the agency. As a result, NASA lacks transparency and efficiency in managing its innovation pipeline. The assessment concluded that NASA needs an approach to collectively leverage existing processes to encourage collaboration and bring together experts to promote innovative ideas and technologies.
The document discusses the need for radical change to create a more sustainable future through innovation and collaboration between businesses, governments, NGOs, and academia. It proposes that the Renaissance2 platform can help accelerate breakthroughs by connecting organizations and enabling the sharing of knowledge and best practices. The goal is to catalyze transformations in key areas through applying new approaches and mobilizing resources.
This document reflects on leadership development based on conversations with over 1200 executives. It discusses [1] the dynamics of business including shifting powers, uncertainty, and a focus on results; [2] the work and life of executives which involves strong involvement, seeking balance, and super information; and [3] the world of executive development as a profession which faces a crowded arena, broken promises, and questions about new approaches. It concludes that executive development is about performance improvement through initiatives focused on results and challenges faced day to day. Leaders operate as architects and facilitators offer expertise in learning processes.
ALN-Bengaluru - Agile Management - Driving Leadership & Complexity of …Ravi Kumar
This document discusses agile management and the role of managers. It addresses the challenges of applying traditional management approaches to agile software development processes, which are characterized as complex adaptive systems. The document outlines several agile principles and manifestos focused on customer satisfaction, transparency, and self-organizing teams. It also examines different views of management and measurements, and argues future management approaches must focus on people, continuous improvement, and adapting to change rather than only efficiency.
Looking back at 2012. what is coming in 2013 ver0.1LearningCafe
This webinar discusses workplace learning trends for 2013. It provides an overview of the webinar details including date, time, and participation information. The webinar will feature a panel discussion on topics like effective learning, developing the learning profession, and leveraging technology. It will also explore capability development approaches and practitioners' strategic focus. The panelists represent various organizations and will share their observations on trends they have seen in 2012 as well as expectations for 2013.
Duke Energy 4Q/03_Transcript_and_QA_-Finalfinance21
Duke Energy held an earnings call to discuss its financial results for Q4 2003 and the full year. The company reported a net loss of $1.48 per share for 2003, which included $2.76 in special items. Most business segments met their targets except for Franchised Electric, which saw lower earnings due to higher costs. Duke Energy's largest loss was primarily driven by asset impairments and other special charges related to its DENA business. Management provided additional details on special items to help analysts understand the company's ongoing earnings performance excluding these one-time charges.
1. The document discusses efforts to strengthen the local food system in six counties in northeast Iowa by increasing connections between producers, institutions, and consumers.
2. It outlines strategies used such as developing a strategic plan, expanding growing seasons, engaging schools in farm to school programs, and increasing commitments from organizations like colleges to purchase local food.
3. Results so far include increased sales and purchases of local food by producers and institutions between 2007-2009, as well as leveraged funding through grants.
Improving Patient Satisfaction with BellwetherBrian Lee Csp
Bellwether is a tool that enables hospitals to proactively manage HCAHPS feedback in real-time to maximize reimbursement from Value-Based Purchasing. It identifies trends in patient satisfaction early through bedside interviews using configurable question sets. Results are automatically integrated with an accountability system to trigger immediate corrective actions when thresholds are not met. This allows hospitals to shape outcomes before official HCAHPS scores are published, which can negatively impact reimbursement.
Lisa Sims, President of The IT Mechanic (www.theitmechanic.com) and founder of The Business Professionals Network (www.bpronetwork.com) shares her insights on what it takes for entrepreneurs to be their own boss and valuable tips to be successful.
Coles partnerships quality and trust-nfdp13DataDryad
Presentation by Simon Coles on issues of partnerships, quality and trust in data publishing given at the Now and Future of Data Publishing Symposium, 22 May 2013, Oxford, UK
In this presentation, Lisa Sims, Chief Technology Consultant for The IT Mechanic, shares her entrepreneurial experiences with small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs as they journey along the road to being their own boss.
Scrum in a
Non-Software Environment
The main part of the session
comprised a workshop discussion
about using Scrum in a nonsoftware
environment. One of
our group has just completed
their first sprint (4 week iteration)
and we started by understanding
a little about the business.
Findings from a 10-year retrospective of Agile held by the BCS Agile Methods SG on 24 Jan 2012 on London(UK) with 100 attendees and over 500 years of Agile experience
This document discusses building high-performance agile teams and outlines some of the key challenges and best practices. Some of the main points include:
- Building high-performance agile teams that consistently deliver results is challenging for many organizations. Challenges include erosion of trust within the team, lack of ownership, non-supportive organizational culture, and fear of conflict.
- Best practices for building high-performance teams focus on establishing strong team values like respect and openness, as well as operating principles like shared vision, trust, collaboration, and learning.
- The role of the agile coach is important to help remove impediments, ensure agile processes are followed, and facilitate meetings to help the team
Agile - Transforming Small Team Thinking Into Big Business ResultsKurt Solarte
This whitepaper discusses challenges with scaling agile development methods within large Australian enterprises. While agile has proven successful for small teams, coordinating agile teams across multiple projects and disciplines remains difficult. The paper recommends Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), a flexible framework that allows customization of agile practices for each team. Successful scaling also requires investment in tools that support the full delivery lifecycle as well as organizational change management.
The document provides an overview of material for an Agile Scrum Master training. It includes an introduction to Agile concepts and frameworks, an explanation of the Agile way of thinking focusing on iterative development, self-organizing teams, and the Agile manifesto. It also discusses how Agility brings predictability and flexibility through awareness of problems and the desire for change. The training schedule, objectives, exam format and literature are outlined.
The document provides information about continuous improvement in Agile processes. It discusses using an iterative transition process with small continuous changes to adopt an Agile development process. An improvement backlog should track items to improve the organization's use of Scrum, similar to a product backlog. An Enterprise Transition Community supports the organization's effort to introduce and improve Scrum use through an iterative process.
This document discusses CGS's approach to delivering effective learning solutions called Lean & Agile Learning (L&A Learning). L&A Learning is rooted in agile and lean principles including Scrum, with an emphasis on continuous innovation, speed to value, and flexibility. It allows CGS to harness rapid technology changes, embrace requirements changes, and demonstrate progress. CGS measures success through cost effectiveness, client satisfaction, and helping clients measure learning impact.
Beyond the Scrum: Implementing Lean Software Practices in Your OrganizationThoughtWorks Studios
This was a presentation made at the Better Software Conference in June 2009 at Las Vegas. This presentation talks about how you can maximize your team’s throughput, reduce cycle time in your release management process and improve product quality.
Are we Prepared for Scrum Master’s Role in COVID-19 Outbreak?Invensis Learning
No one was ready for COVID19! With a back to back lockdown months affecting the entire business verse globally. According to a PwC survey, 72% of respondents believe their companies will be more Agile going forward and 68% believe they will have flexible work environment to better equip in the long run.
In this regard, know how the Scrum Masters help thousands of teams all around the globe to collaborate? Do you feel that you are prepared for Post-COVID19 changes the way we work? How to deal with the disruptive changes?
#scrummaster #agile #covid19 #agileprojectmanagement #scrum #itmanagers #projectmanager
Areas covered:
1. Who is a Scrum Master and why we need a Scrum Master
2. How Scrum Master helped the teams in COVID19 to align and maximize value.
3. Why this is the high time for us to know about the role.
4. How can you be a good Scrum Master?
Who’ll benefit:
* IT Professionals
* Project Managers
* Delivery Managers
* QA and Testing Professionals
* Scrum Team Members
* Aspiring Scrum Masters
* Anyone who might be interested to know or oppose the idea all together
Speaker Profile:
Satyavrat Nirala is one of Asia’s youngest trainer and coach with certifications of CSM, CSPO, and CAL1, CAMS certification. He has been training and coaching Project management teams, Scrum teams internationally for the last 7 years. Started his career as a project technical analyst, Satyavrat has traversed through various roles in his journey including that of a self-thought coder, software team member, Business Analyst, SME, Scrum Master, Process Consultant, Project Management and Agile guide and coach and Mentor over a span of 14+ years.
For more information please visit our website: https://www.invensislearning.com/
A community of practice (CoP) is a group that shares a domain of interest and deepens their expertise through regular interaction. The CoP discussed in the document focuses on agile best practices and is comprised of scrum masters from different teams. The CoP aims to improve knowledge sharing, address challenges, and disseminate lessons learned across teams. Benefits include increased expertise, problem solving, and adoption of best practices organization-wide.
This document provides an introduction and agenda for an Agile Basics training session. It includes information about the trainer, Salah Elleithy, including his qualifications and experience in Agile coaching. The learning objectives are outlined, which focus on understanding what makes agility essential, the agile mindset, and the difference between doing agile and being agile. The agenda covers topics such as defining agility, the origins of Agile and the Agile Manifesto, challenges to enabling agility, stages of learning, and understanding the agile mindset. Logistics and ground rules for participation are also mentioned.
With an increasing number of organizations adopting Agile practices and the majority of them following SCRUM, Agile has gained mainstream recognition in the past couple of years. Today organizations are seeing the value in Agile ceremonies and have brought in the roles and practices that are instrumental in the success of SCRUM.
The Agile workshop has several benefits such as helping you understand the SCRUM process, providing the ability to prune product backlog, conduct release planning ceremony and much more.
Recurring obstacles I\'ve seen working with large organizations:
1) Naive Resource Management, 2) Teams Organized by Functional Specialization, 3) Teams Organized by Architectural Components, 4) Distraction, 5) Reluctance to Continuously Refine, Reprioritize and Rescope, 6) Rampant Technical Debt, 7) Lack of Commitment to Transformation
Agile and lean product development the fundamentalsRussell Pannone
The document discusses delivering value early and often through agile development practices to gain competitive advantages. It emphasizes cross-functional collaboration, continuous delivery of working software increments, early defect discovery, eliminating waste, and frequent feedback to improve. The goal is satisfying customers through adaptive teams that can sustain a constant development pace.
This document provides information about a Lean Six Sigma for IT workshop that will teach attendees how to apply Lean Six Sigma methodology to improve the quality and efficiency of their IT processes. The 2-day workshop will cover the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) process improvement methodology. Attendees will learn techniques to identify improvement opportunities, measure key performance metrics, determine root causes of issues, develop solutions to address problems, and create control plans to maintain gains. On the second day, attendees can earn their Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification by participating in exercises and passing an exam. The workshop aims to provide IT professionals with tools to continuously enhance their work through data-driven problem solving.
This document provides information about a Lean Six Sigma for IT conference being held on December 1-4, 2009 in Arlington, VA. The conference will provide training and certification in Lean Six Sigma concepts and tools and how they can be applied to improve IT processes. Attendees will learn how to analyze and improve IT processes using DMAIC methodology. There will be sessions on project selection, change management, combining Lean Six Sigma with ITIL, and driving innovation. The conference offers CPE credits and yellow belt certification.
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Agile mk-journal-issue-002
1. Agile:MK December 2012
Journal
January 2013
ISSUE 02
A special interest group for
professionals from the Milton
Keynes area who are interested in
learning, sharing and encouraging
the use of agile methodologies such
as Scrum, Extreme Programming &
Lean Thinking.
Agile:
“Getting the
Business Involved”
Open Space Session,
facilitated by Iain McKenna,
Certified Scrum Trainer
Monday 25th February 2013
6pm – 8pm
Sponsored by
2. Agile:MK Journal
January 2013 Agile:MK User Group
Happy New Year and welcome to the second
edition of the Agile:MK Journal. The Agile User
Group in Milton Keynes meets once a month
to share and learn about agile methods
through real-world experiences. Each month
Steve Garnett we’ll publish a brief overview of the discussions
Founder Agile:MK
and insights of the group in this journal.
To register your interest, If you’d like to join the group so you can
please join the attend, the sessions, and be involved in the
LinkedIn Group at
http://tinyurl.com/ discussions face to face, to learn or share
agile-mk-liug your experiences, please join us on LinkedIn.
Agile:
“Getting the Business Involved”
Open space discussion workshop
Facilitator: Ian McKenna
Monday 25th February 2013 Profile Facilitator:
Iain McKenna, CST
Jurys Inn Hotel, Midsummer
Boulevard, Milton Keynes, MK9 2HP A Certified Scrum Trainer with over
30 years’ experience in software
engineering and over 10 years’
experience of helping teams use
Scrum, XP and other agile and lean
frameworks to deliver amazing
software products in organisations
including United Health, Cisco,
AOL, BskyB, The Open University
and the BBC.
Agile:MK Journal,
design & produced by endjin
www.endjin.com
3. December 2012
The State of the Art
The adoption of Agile methods and practices within the UK has
been on-going for close to 20 years. Scrum has become a more
predominant method over the last decade with a high growth
curve over the past 5 years. However, this high growth of adoption
has not come without cost.
Agile has suffered from a lack of understanding, some governance structure, then it is likely that strong
poor implementations, and a proliferation of terms oversight will be enforced. The creation of steering
and complexity that means that Agile is increasingly groups, status reports, detailed business cases, and
becoming polarised from one of its core other artefacts to facilitate distanced decision-making
principles: Simplicity. may be required to see a project to completion. This
can lead to waiting for decisions and delays in progress.
When a mature company or organisation adopts agile Can this governance be distributed? I.e. Can more of
principles, values and methods, it necessarily has to the control of how a project is run, who works on it,
undergo significant changes in structures, processes, and its decision making be given to the project team
governance, culture, and technologies. without recourse to a governing body?
For a company to value its individuals and personal Another example. There are issues with the team’s
interactions OVER processes and tools, working understanding of the business domain required to
software OVER comprehensive documentation, create software because they are located off-shore
customer collaboration OVER contract negotiation away from business subject matter experts? So, can
and responding to change OVER following a plan, the software development be brought on-shore to
the mind-set, governance and culture of the the business? Can the business people be seconded
organisation has to change. to the development team? Or is there little movement
for change and therefore we may have to implement
At this fundamental level of change lies the crux of Proxy Product Owners or a team of Product Owners
the problem. (the ‘middle-men’) to represent the business subject
matter experts?
What is the company’s propensity for change?
Because agile teams are constantly trying to improve
How UK companies answer this question is shaping cycle times and remove impediments, they are often
how the UK Agile community is developing. looking at problems at their root cause, and finding
ways to help the team move on. If the company has a
high propensity for change then it is possible to get to
the root cause and remove it.
However, more commonly, the root cause problem
is embedded in the organisation at a level that is very
difficult for a team to remove. Work-arounds and
sub-optimal solutions are adopted. These sub-optimal
solutions have led to a proliferation of “agile” patterns
and solutions that are making Agile a complex beast
when its essence is simplicity.
Propensity for Change & Complexity of Method
The Case Study below was the main subject of the
When adopting agile, we are essentially embarking January session and we learned through our
on a continuous improvement activity and the more discussions that an essential part of adopting agile
a company is able to change, the closer to root cause methods effectively and creating hyper-productive
removal an agile team can reach. teams is making organisational change.
For example, if a company has a rigid or centralised MG-Alfa (you’ll hear more about them later) recognised
4. Agile:MK Journal
the project was important. They hired good people, comply with the new Solvency II regulations, but was
co-located the team, gave the team autonomy over also seen as a valuable exercise in its own right. As
their working practices, environments, processes part of the wider actuarial project, an on-demand,
and architecture and let the team grow. The team cloud-based grid computing platform was also to be
maintained agile principles and values and flourished developed to cost-effectively execute the complex
because of the key decisions made earlier on about models being created.
how to run an agile project.
After some proof of concepts work during 2010, an
I believe this foresight was key in this project’s success initial team of 2 senior developers began developing
the grid and were joined in early 2011 by 2 more
senior developers, including myself. With just one
An Agile Cloud Based Project - change of personnel in late 2011, we became a highly
Milliman MG-ALFA Compute for Azure effective team.
by Ian Shimmings, Associate at Endjin
The problem we had to solve was how to execute
This article is based on a short presentation and the large number of jobs generated by the actuarial
discussion to the Agile:MK user group, which was, models in a timely, reliable manner. As a rough guide,
in turn, based on nearly 2 years as a senior developer a quarterly complete model recalculation, as required
on the project. for Solvency II, may consist of thousands of jobs, each
with typically 1,000 tasks which may each take between
Summary 20 minutes and 4 hours on a single core machine.
A computing grid platform for Windows Azure, called This equates to many hundreds of years computing
MG-ALFA Compute for Azure, was developed and which needed to be complete within 3 to 4 days. It also
launched at the end of 2011 followed by multiple needed to provide for the needs of ad-hoc job runs.
enhancement releases. It is used to execute the
complex actuarial models created by actuaries using High level requirements of the system included:
the MG-ALFA core model generation tool. It has been
tested with more than 45,000 compute nodes in a • Jobs must never be lost
single grid, across multiple Microsoft data centres. It
is in highly successful production use with Phoenix • Jobs must complete if possible
Life who frequently run multiple grids with many
thousands of cores. It is also now being used by • Problems that occur in production
other existing MG-ALFA customers as a Software should be traceable
as a Service to simply and cost-effectively run their
actuarial models. MG-ALFA Compute for Azure • Independent of model changes and versioning
has become one of the largest Azure installations
outside Microsoft. • Be able to control and scale the grid to maximise
cost-efficiency
The grid platform was developed by a highly focussed
team of just 4 co-located senior developers who took The chosen solution was to build the computing
full responsibility for all analysis, testing and life-cycle platform based on the Microsoft Azure Compute
management, as well as actual development. We used a platform using worker/web roles, storage and the
simple, but very effective, agile process allied with good management API. Azure queues are used to
development practices, that evolved with the project. transmit control and status information with blob
storage holding data. As well as the main job execution
This team at times reached what may be described and grid control systems, there are custom diagnostics
as ‘hyper-productivity’ where significant functionality and an event driven information service used to drive
was created extremely quickly to very high levels of web, mobile web and Windows 8/RT user interfaces.
functional and software design quality.
Agile Process
Introduction The development process we started with was a simple
In September 2010, Milliman MG-ALFA was chosen by agile one involving weekly iterations. At the end of
Phoenix Group to simplify, rationalise and streamline each week we would review what was done, have a
their actuarial projection systems and models (http:// retrospective to improve how we worked, and plan for
uk.milliman.com/news-events/press/pdfs/uk-based- the following week. Our tracking consisted solely of
phoenix-group.pdf). This was triggered by the need to cards and a simple three column Kanban style board.
5. December 2012
The cards consisted of MMFs (Minimum Marketable • If it can go wrong, (with thousands of cores running)
Features), Stories and Tasks. Where possible we would it will go wrong!
only work on a single MMF at a time.
o Processes must be resilient and recoverable
As the months went by the process began to evolve
until we moved to a continuous development style o Persist data securely and often to aid recoverability
where we no longer worked in weekly units but simply
selected MMFs from the frequently re-prioritised and o Write lots of diagnostics, even when running live,
modified list of MMFs originally chosen during release as repeating error conditions can be difficult and/
planning. We only created Story cards where a large or expensive
MMF warranted it and rarely wrote Task cards as that
was left to the developers working on the feature. A • The internet is slow and unreliable
retrospective or re-planning session would be held
occasionally if considered necessary, but changes to o Retry (almost) everything
the required MMFs and the way we worked typically
happened by agreement as and when one of us felt o Expect out of order and repeated events
there was a need.
• Keep in mind how the system will be managed
This process evolution helped us be, as efficient as in production
we could be while keeping the process itself as little
more than a reminder of what we should be doing, o Any tool useful during development and testing
developing the application. We specifically avoided may be useful during support and should be kept
naming the process we used (Scrum or Kanban or
anything else) as that makes it a thing in its own right, o Consider alerting on error, but reserve such errors
frequently a hindrance, rather than a help. for worst case scenarios
Other process features key to maintaining application Testing large, distributed applications thoroughly for
quality included: the cloud can be challenging due to its remoteness,
the number of processes and the time and cost
• Being rigorous about developing the minimum involved. This makes development in the first place
features required at the time of high quality code even more important than some
other scenarios.
• Frequently holding team design sessions whenever
required, at least one for most MMFs • Rapid feedback on quality particularly important
• Mandatory TDD (Test Driven Development) o Good unit test coverage
• Mandatory pair programming o Effective local ‘implementations’ of the cloud
environment important
• A complete CI (Continuous Integration) environment,
including deployment to an integration environment o Automated local end-to-end tests are vital
for quick verification of the ‘wiring up’ of the
• A fully automated build, test, package, deployment application
developed an maintained by the development team
o Automated deployment and in cloud end-to-
Developing & Testing Large, end tests
Distributed Systems in the Cloud
All the best development practices, as well as high o Key integration and UI tests
quality, well structured code, are as important when
developing for the cloud as for any other kind of • Carefully scheduled full scale tests due to the
development. However, like developing for any time and expense involved
specific environment, it is important to understand
the features presented and constraints imposed o Automated job submission
when working in the cloud and/or developing large
scale distributed applications. o Manual UI testing
6. Agile:MK Journal
o Chaos Monkey testing – random server Companies
outage, network failure, full memory or disk,etc. Milliman is among the world’s largest independent
actuarial and consulting firms. Founded in Seattle,
• Continuous Integration test runs that exercise all Washington in 1947, they are among the world’s
tests in order of time taken largest providers of actuarial and related products
and services. Consulting practices are owned and
Learnings managed by principals. MG-ALFA is both a practice
I enjoyed my time developing the Milliman MG-ALFA within Milliman and the name of the powerful
Compute for Azure application. There were many financial modelling tool they produce.
challenges and I certainly learned a lot. Below are just
a few highlights: Phoenix Group Holdings has a Premium Listing on
the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the
• Agile is not about named processes, the arguments FTSE 250 index. The Group is a closed life assurance
between proponents and sticking to the ‘rules’. It fund consolidator that specialises in the management
is about using any simple template and constantly and acquisition of closed life and pension funds, and
evolving as the team grows in experience operates primarily in the United Kingdom. Measured by
and confidence total assets, the Group is the largest UK consolidator
of closed life assurance funds. The Group has over
• High quality software developers are required 6 million policyholders and assets of £71.6 billion as
and are one of the most important factors for at 30th June 2012.
a successful software development project
Links
• A small, highly skilled, agile team can • Milliman – www.milliman.com
deliver massively
• Phoenix Group – www.thephoenixgroup.com
• Each team is unique, construct and modify
as required • Endjin – www.endjin.com
• Microsoft case study – www.microsoft.com/
• Once a good team has formed do what you can
casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudy
to keep it together
id=710000001018
• Good developers can (and are willing to) analyse, • Milliman cloud computing – www.milliman.com/
test, configure builds and deployments, as well expertise/life-financial/products-tools/mg-alfa/
as develop cloud-computing
• A good developer without specific skills is generally • Arapsys – www.arapsys.com
better than vice-versa
• Developing for the cloud at Netflix – techblog.netflix.
• Only build what is required now: com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.
html
o Though don’t procrastinate and use as an excuse
to ‘bite the bullet’ and make the big changes
when needed
• Making a practice mandatory (TDD, pairing, etc.) is
the best way to REALLY learn it
o Prevents reverting to type when under pressure
o Once learned make optional to get the best results
• Building and testing for large, distributed applications
in the cloud is different…
7. Agile: MK Bookshop December 2012
The Machine that Changed the World
By Womack, Jones & Roos
At the time of its release, this book threw a bright spotlight on how
the Japanese automobile industry was out-stripping the American
automobile industry through the use of what is now termed “lean
thinking”. The prelude to Lean Thinking, we are told the story of
the automobile industry from Henry Ford through to modern day,
highlighting the varying philosophies and methods of manufacturing.
In taking the historical view, the book provides a clear illustration of
the difference between traditional and lean practices. The parallels
and connotations with our current software industry leap out from
the page, and illustrate how and why some companies are repeating
the mistakes of the past in their approach to adopting agile and
lean practices.
Crucial Conversations Fearless Change The Lean Startup
by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler by Manns and Rising by Eric Ries
Organizational Patterns of Agile Essential Scrum Agile Software Development:
Software Development by Kenny Rubin The Cooperative Game
by Coplien & Harrison by Alistair Cockburn
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