Vasco Duarte discusses how agile scales while waterfall does not. He defines scaling as when the effort to manage a project increases at a slower pace than the amount of work being managed. With waterfall, managing requirements gets exponentially harder as the number grows due to dependencies. However, with agile hierarchical requirements organization like epics, features, and stories, the effort increases more slowly. Therefore, agile scales better than waterfall for large projects.
Michael Handy, Sr. Business Analyst at ActianLucidchart
Lucidchart users, partners, industry experts, and team members gathered in downtown Austin to learn, be inspired, and network with one another. One of our guest speakers was Michael Handy, Sr. Business Analyst at Actian. Michael talked about how Actian rolled Lucidchart to entire teams and helped their teams be more productive.
Agile software development has proven to be more successful than traditional methods. However there are many Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP). It is difficult to make a right choice.
Do you want to know the differences between Scrum and Lean? Perhaps you struggle with your existing Scrum implementation and looking for a better methodology. So did I. I spent many hours looking for continuous improvement beyond Retrospectives and Sprint Reviews. And I found my answer in applying Lean Principles.
This session will help you to increase your understanding of Lean and Scrum. It will also give you some practical examples of implementing Lean in Scrum teams.
Most of the times I have seen the teams spending immense amount of time in mastering the mechanics than the intent.
Key to successful agile adoption is to have the agile as a team culture than just doing it
Michael Handy, Sr. Business Analyst at ActianLucidchart
Lucidchart users, partners, industry experts, and team members gathered in downtown Austin to learn, be inspired, and network with one another. One of our guest speakers was Michael Handy, Sr. Business Analyst at Actian. Michael talked about how Actian rolled Lucidchart to entire teams and helped their teams be more productive.
Agile software development has proven to be more successful than traditional methods. However there are many Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP). It is difficult to make a right choice.
Do you want to know the differences between Scrum and Lean? Perhaps you struggle with your existing Scrum implementation and looking for a better methodology. So did I. I spent many hours looking for continuous improvement beyond Retrospectives and Sprint Reviews. And I found my answer in applying Lean Principles.
This session will help you to increase your understanding of Lean and Scrum. It will also give you some practical examples of implementing Lean in Scrum teams.
Most of the times I have seen the teams spending immense amount of time in mastering the mechanics than the intent.
Key to successful agile adoption is to have the agile as a team culture than just doing it
Why is it so hard? Agile adoption anti-patterns, how to spot them and what to...Milan Juza
Adopting agile ways of working, especially in large organisations, often seems incredibly hard and challenging. There is a natural resistance to change, too much complexity to deal with, too much organisational inertia. As a result, many experienced practitioners struggle to get traction and to drive change in the organisation as a whole. In this talk, you will learn about some of the key anti-patterns that often occur during transition to agile. This deck also covers approaches that can help you spot these anti-patterns and about strategies and techniques to avoid and/or remove them.
Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile - Septe...MARRIS Consulting
Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile and ToC expert. Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If your Agile is broken then this is how to fix it!
Your Agile teams are busy. Busy delivering. Busy improving. Your quality is amazing. Rework is low. The product looks great. Your users love it. You are a high performing team!
But your internal customers say your teams are slow. This session will teach you how to use the Theory of Constraints to figure out how to speed up, by finding the one thing that’s slowing them down.
This webinar will cover how, in an Agile environment:
- to better control scope creep,
- to reinforce your relationship with the I.T. Development team’s client,
- to be able to make commitments and honour them and
- to decide where your bottleneck should be.
About the speaker
Clarke Ching is a computer scientist with an MBA who discovered Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (ToC) in 2003 and has been using it ever since to accelerate Agile initiatives. He is fascinated by Agile and obsessed with ToC.
He wrote the amazon best-sellers Rolling Rocks Downhill and The Bottleneck Rules. Rolling Rocks Downhill teaches 3 things: the fundamentals of Agile combined with ToC; how to use those fundamentals to deliver big projects faster and on time; and how to deliver quietly huge transformations. It’s been featured in The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. It was one of Barbara Oakley’s top 10 books of 2019. It was the #2 best-selling Leadership book on amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey’s 7-habits book.
He has been Agile / Lean / ToC expert in: GE Energy, Dell, Royal London (life insurance & pensions), Gazprom and Standard Life Aberdeen among other organizations. He is the past Chairperson of Agile Scotland. He is a lecturer at Victoria University School Of Management in New Zealand where he now lives.
Today he is the founder and Chief Productivity Officer of Odd Socks Consulting
This is a copy of my session slides from AgileIndy 2015. The session walked through a couple interactive exercises that help highlight some of the underlying theories and principles of agile.
LeanKit Webinar: Evolving Your Daily Standup with Kanban by Brendan WovchkoLeanKit
Have your daily standups become stale? Discover how to reinvigorate the conversation by focusing on the core principles of Kanban.
Brendan Wovchko of HUGE I/O will explain how to engage teams with meaningful questions that surface problems, reduce process waste and improve the flow of work.
You'll learn how to:
- “Walk the board” with Kanban
- Experiment with fresh questions and techniques
- Decide if your daily standup really needs to be daily
Enabling your team to identify improvement opportunities on a daily basis promotes self-organization and keeps the focus on delivering value.
Kanban has been used for years in manufacturing to help organizations become more efficient, deliver products faster and to increase quality. However, the concepts and philosophies of Kanban can be used by anyone to improve whatever they are doing from software development to patient management to sandwich making. Kanban is an incremental approach to improvement. Here is a short presentation on why Kanban is great and why you should learn more about it.
Agile Roles #3 The Product Owner – What is this Mythical Beast?Agile Auckland
What the heck is a Product Owner? Why do you need one? And how can the Product Owner help a team soar – or crash horribly?
In this talk Anthony Marter will share his experience developing the Product Owner role in 2 large NZ software organisations. He’ll cover
· The basics of the role, and how an effective Product Owner contributes to the success of a team
· The challenges of the role, especially at scale
· Why an effective Product Owner is key to establishing and maintaining organisational Agility
Atlassian User Group Insights: AUGment your Teams and CultureAtlassian
The Atlassian User Group (AUG) program built a culture of community that includes over 130 groups around the world and continues to grow 60% YoY, thanks to a team of passionate volunteer leaders and members. Building a focused and motivated team across the globe isn't easy, but we'll share the foundation to the user group community's success along with take-aways for attendees looking to build successful teams of their own. In this unique session, we will highlight the Atlassian User Group culture by presenting elements of a real user group event and provide meaningful information for attendees, including the opportunity to sign up and experience the user group team culture themselves.
Discover 12 principles for Agile Development created by @liquidconcept.
Liquid Concept is a swiss interactive communications agency. We share the values of our international clients: quality, user-friendliness, clarity and attention to detail
Many companies want to derive the benefits of an agile approach to software product development but struggle to do so, not least due to legacy processes and infrastructure which seem "too hard" to change.
Locomote is a small company on a growth path, and as such we have an opportunity to be principle-driven in how we grow success, avoiding mistakes other companies make as they look to "scale". What do we even mean when we talk about "growing" or "scaling"? What are we trying to achieve?
This presentation will invite discussion on some key questions we asked ourselves at Locomote in how we should grow our engineering team, such that we do not create overhead that slows us down and kills our startup culture.
Establishing principles for how you want to grow makes decision-making about process, practices and team structures far more straightforward, and aligned with a shared vision of what awesome looks like in your context. Hopefully the audience will come away with some food for thought and concrete ideas to try in their own workplace.
After three years as a Scrum Master and Agile coach, I hit a wall coaching a team that did not want to try popular Agile engineering techniques such as TDD and pair programming. I had become a Scrum Master after four years working on the business analysis and account ownership side of things and could not speak from personal experience about engineering practices. In order to get some first-hand experience and to gain a new perspective, I chose to spend a year or two as a software developer on a Scrum team.
The experience has been eye-opening. I experienced a tremendous cognitive load working with a wide array of technologies; this pulled my attention away from many of the collaborative and process-oriented activities I cared about as a Scrum Master. I was surprised to feel strong pressure to complete work quickly, cutting corners, even when the Product Owner and Scrum Master were not asking me to. When this pressure was explicit, it usually came from my fellow developers. On the other hand, there is real joy in writing code and seeing a system do something worthwhile that it wasn't doing before. My outlook has changed tremendously and is something I want to share with anyone who works with development teams, especially Scrum Masters and other coaches. I am still enjoying my time as a developer, but I'm looking forward to returning to coaching and incorporating this experience into my approach.
Slides for my presentation at Agile2019 (https://agile2019.sched.com/event/OD8A/undercover-scrum-master-dane-weber)
Given a desire to improve our software development endeavours, we tend to apply models and frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, LeSS, SAFe, even a custom implementation of Agile itself, without really understanding what our current model is, or what we value.
This approach leads us to do things and reject things in an ad-hoc way; not knowing whether the change will actually result in improvements in the areas where we need it most.
At an organisational level, we often don’t even want or value “agility”. We default to notions of “making the organisation agile” or “scaling agile” without confirming if that is what is actually desired.
This talk will take the audience (minus an agenda) through three simple steps to improvement, by:
1) Understanding goals;
2) Understanding desired cultural values on key dichotomy scales; and
3) Synchronising in iterations.
At a small company/single product level, following these steps might result in a group of people synchronising to product goals as a Scrum team. At a larger company/multiple product level (aka “at scale”), it might result in teams across departments being synchronised to organisational goals via organisational sprints/iterations.
The audience will come away with practical steps to effecting team, multi-team or full organisational change, in the area of product development. Underpinning these steps will be the key message that Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean Principles can aid the improvement journey: but none of these things should be a goal in itself.
LKNL12: Kanban for the whole value streamVasco Duarte
You’ve been there before. You know better, you have a good idea to support your agile transition. Work starts, things work well at first, but then you bump against organizational barriers. Sales, Marketing, Support all have a different language and a different view into the value stream. How can we start an organizational change without a shared model of how the company should be organized?
Those are all symptoms of a gap in our Agile community: we lack a organizational model for company-wide Agile adoption and company-wide continuous improvement. Examples of this include: no company-wide flow-model (kanban) from idea to sales to idea and so on; we have no way to evaluate where the bottlenecks are the moment they are not in “our silo”. We lack a theoretical model for designing software organizations.
A theory is something that informs day-to-day decisions and experiments (e.g. PDCA). In this talk we will explain an
organizational design concept developed over several years, and use concrete examples to describe a model that you can use in support of - not only your agile adoption - but your company improvement process and your new organizational design.
Agile is easy! It's making it work with your business that is hardVasco Duarte
A talk about the next level of Agile adoption. How do we make it work for our business? How does Agile adoption affect our R&D, our sales, our product management and ultimately our business success?
Why is it so hard? Agile adoption anti-patterns, how to spot them and what to...Milan Juza
Adopting agile ways of working, especially in large organisations, often seems incredibly hard and challenging. There is a natural resistance to change, too much complexity to deal with, too much organisational inertia. As a result, many experienced practitioners struggle to get traction and to drive change in the organisation as a whole. In this talk, you will learn about some of the key anti-patterns that often occur during transition to agile. This deck also covers approaches that can help you spot these anti-patterns and about strategies and techniques to avoid and/or remove them.
Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile - Septe...MARRIS Consulting
Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile and ToC expert. Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If your Agile is broken then this is how to fix it!
Your Agile teams are busy. Busy delivering. Busy improving. Your quality is amazing. Rework is low. The product looks great. Your users love it. You are a high performing team!
But your internal customers say your teams are slow. This session will teach you how to use the Theory of Constraints to figure out how to speed up, by finding the one thing that’s slowing them down.
This webinar will cover how, in an Agile environment:
- to better control scope creep,
- to reinforce your relationship with the I.T. Development team’s client,
- to be able to make commitments and honour them and
- to decide where your bottleneck should be.
About the speaker
Clarke Ching is a computer scientist with an MBA who discovered Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (ToC) in 2003 and has been using it ever since to accelerate Agile initiatives. He is fascinated by Agile and obsessed with ToC.
He wrote the amazon best-sellers Rolling Rocks Downhill and The Bottleneck Rules. Rolling Rocks Downhill teaches 3 things: the fundamentals of Agile combined with ToC; how to use those fundamentals to deliver big projects faster and on time; and how to deliver quietly huge transformations. It’s been featured in The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. It was one of Barbara Oakley’s top 10 books of 2019. It was the #2 best-selling Leadership book on amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey’s 7-habits book.
He has been Agile / Lean / ToC expert in: GE Energy, Dell, Royal London (life insurance & pensions), Gazprom and Standard Life Aberdeen among other organizations. He is the past Chairperson of Agile Scotland. He is a lecturer at Victoria University School Of Management in New Zealand where he now lives.
Today he is the founder and Chief Productivity Officer of Odd Socks Consulting
This is a copy of my session slides from AgileIndy 2015. The session walked through a couple interactive exercises that help highlight some of the underlying theories and principles of agile.
LeanKit Webinar: Evolving Your Daily Standup with Kanban by Brendan WovchkoLeanKit
Have your daily standups become stale? Discover how to reinvigorate the conversation by focusing on the core principles of Kanban.
Brendan Wovchko of HUGE I/O will explain how to engage teams with meaningful questions that surface problems, reduce process waste and improve the flow of work.
You'll learn how to:
- “Walk the board” with Kanban
- Experiment with fresh questions and techniques
- Decide if your daily standup really needs to be daily
Enabling your team to identify improvement opportunities on a daily basis promotes self-organization and keeps the focus on delivering value.
Kanban has been used for years in manufacturing to help organizations become more efficient, deliver products faster and to increase quality. However, the concepts and philosophies of Kanban can be used by anyone to improve whatever they are doing from software development to patient management to sandwich making. Kanban is an incremental approach to improvement. Here is a short presentation on why Kanban is great and why you should learn more about it.
Agile Roles #3 The Product Owner – What is this Mythical Beast?Agile Auckland
What the heck is a Product Owner? Why do you need one? And how can the Product Owner help a team soar – or crash horribly?
In this talk Anthony Marter will share his experience developing the Product Owner role in 2 large NZ software organisations. He’ll cover
· The basics of the role, and how an effective Product Owner contributes to the success of a team
· The challenges of the role, especially at scale
· Why an effective Product Owner is key to establishing and maintaining organisational Agility
Atlassian User Group Insights: AUGment your Teams and CultureAtlassian
The Atlassian User Group (AUG) program built a culture of community that includes over 130 groups around the world and continues to grow 60% YoY, thanks to a team of passionate volunteer leaders and members. Building a focused and motivated team across the globe isn't easy, but we'll share the foundation to the user group community's success along with take-aways for attendees looking to build successful teams of their own. In this unique session, we will highlight the Atlassian User Group culture by presenting elements of a real user group event and provide meaningful information for attendees, including the opportunity to sign up and experience the user group team culture themselves.
Discover 12 principles for Agile Development created by @liquidconcept.
Liquid Concept is a swiss interactive communications agency. We share the values of our international clients: quality, user-friendliness, clarity and attention to detail
Many companies want to derive the benefits of an agile approach to software product development but struggle to do so, not least due to legacy processes and infrastructure which seem "too hard" to change.
Locomote is a small company on a growth path, and as such we have an opportunity to be principle-driven in how we grow success, avoiding mistakes other companies make as they look to "scale". What do we even mean when we talk about "growing" or "scaling"? What are we trying to achieve?
This presentation will invite discussion on some key questions we asked ourselves at Locomote in how we should grow our engineering team, such that we do not create overhead that slows us down and kills our startup culture.
Establishing principles for how you want to grow makes decision-making about process, practices and team structures far more straightforward, and aligned with a shared vision of what awesome looks like in your context. Hopefully the audience will come away with some food for thought and concrete ideas to try in their own workplace.
After three years as a Scrum Master and Agile coach, I hit a wall coaching a team that did not want to try popular Agile engineering techniques such as TDD and pair programming. I had become a Scrum Master after four years working on the business analysis and account ownership side of things and could not speak from personal experience about engineering practices. In order to get some first-hand experience and to gain a new perspective, I chose to spend a year or two as a software developer on a Scrum team.
The experience has been eye-opening. I experienced a tremendous cognitive load working with a wide array of technologies; this pulled my attention away from many of the collaborative and process-oriented activities I cared about as a Scrum Master. I was surprised to feel strong pressure to complete work quickly, cutting corners, even when the Product Owner and Scrum Master were not asking me to. When this pressure was explicit, it usually came from my fellow developers. On the other hand, there is real joy in writing code and seeing a system do something worthwhile that it wasn't doing before. My outlook has changed tremendously and is something I want to share with anyone who works with development teams, especially Scrum Masters and other coaches. I am still enjoying my time as a developer, but I'm looking forward to returning to coaching and incorporating this experience into my approach.
Slides for my presentation at Agile2019 (https://agile2019.sched.com/event/OD8A/undercover-scrum-master-dane-weber)
Given a desire to improve our software development endeavours, we tend to apply models and frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, LeSS, SAFe, even a custom implementation of Agile itself, without really understanding what our current model is, or what we value.
This approach leads us to do things and reject things in an ad-hoc way; not knowing whether the change will actually result in improvements in the areas where we need it most.
At an organisational level, we often don’t even want or value “agility”. We default to notions of “making the organisation agile” or “scaling agile” without confirming if that is what is actually desired.
This talk will take the audience (minus an agenda) through three simple steps to improvement, by:
1) Understanding goals;
2) Understanding desired cultural values on key dichotomy scales; and
3) Synchronising in iterations.
At a small company/single product level, following these steps might result in a group of people synchronising to product goals as a Scrum team. At a larger company/multiple product level (aka “at scale”), it might result in teams across departments being synchronised to organisational goals via organisational sprints/iterations.
The audience will come away with practical steps to effecting team, multi-team or full organisational change, in the area of product development. Underpinning these steps will be the key message that Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean Principles can aid the improvement journey: but none of these things should be a goal in itself.
LKNL12: Kanban for the whole value streamVasco Duarte
You’ve been there before. You know better, you have a good idea to support your agile transition. Work starts, things work well at first, but then you bump against organizational barriers. Sales, Marketing, Support all have a different language and a different view into the value stream. How can we start an organizational change without a shared model of how the company should be organized?
Those are all symptoms of a gap in our Agile community: we lack a organizational model for company-wide Agile adoption and company-wide continuous improvement. Examples of this include: no company-wide flow-model (kanban) from idea to sales to idea and so on; we have no way to evaluate where the bottlenecks are the moment they are not in “our silo”. We lack a theoretical model for designing software organizations.
A theory is something that informs day-to-day decisions and experiments (e.g. PDCA). In this talk we will explain an
organizational design concept developed over several years, and use concrete examples to describe a model that you can use in support of - not only your agile adoption - but your company improvement process and your new organizational design.
Agile is easy! It's making it work with your business that is hardVasco Duarte
A talk about the next level of Agile adoption. How do we make it work for our business? How does Agile adoption affect our R&D, our sales, our product management and ultimately our business success?
We need proof! - Talk at Agile Estonia's Agile SaturdayVasco Duarte
This is a call to action for all Agilists out there. It is not enough to see and experience the success of Agile. For our industry to truly evolve we need to start publishing data, figures, proof that it is indeed a better approach.
Check out the companion blog post here: http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.blogspot.com/2010/02/we-need-proof-for-better-understanding.html
Changing business of testing - Testing Assembly Helsinki 2014Vasco Duarte
Testing jobs will move to cheaper countries unless the role of testing changes. This is a trend that is happening already, we see large teams of testers being moved to other countries, simply because it is cheaper to do bad testing there!
Testing is a critical part of the product and software development process, and if we don't change its role it will slowly become obsolete. The fact is, that the traditional view of testing endangers testing jobs: now here, and later also in cheaper countries.
I propose a different view of testing. I propose that testing is about enabling business results, not just technical quality. I propose that the tester's job goes far beyond finding issues to track, but also finding users to acquire, finding methods to succeed in the software business. Testing in my view is about making businesses succeed, not about avoid failures in software.
In this presentation I'll describe how a very simple change can profoundly transform the role of testing in a way that it directly enables and supports our businesses! Testing is about making our businesses succeed!
The road ahead is not easy, and not every tester is ready to embrace this view of testing. But the road ahead is inevitable. And we have to start on that journey now!
Story Points considered harmful – a new look at estimation techniquesVasco Duarte
Story Points are the typical estimation unit for Agile Teams. But do they really work, or are there better ways to estimate? In this talk, we‘ll look at the problem of estimating, as well as empirical data questioning the validity of story points, and we‘ll explore new techniques, based on cognitive psychology, chronobiology, and good old common sense, that will immediately help your teams estimate more accurately.
No estimates - a controversial way to improve estimation with results-handoutsVasco Duarte
Often we hear that estimating a project is a must. "We can't make decisions without them" we hear often.
In this session I'll present examples of how we can predict a release date of a project without any estimates, only relying on easily available data.
I'll show how we can follow progress on a project at all times without having to rely on guesswork, and we will review how large, very large and small projects have already benefited from this in the past.
At the end of the session you will be ready to start your own
#NoEstimates journey.
From an Idea to a Vision you can implement - Vision workshopVasco Duarte
You've been there. You are tasked with implementing a product that someone else cooked up. What do do next? Follow the spec you say? Wrong!
Developing a product without this Vision is not just waste, it is bad business for you and for your customer.
Before we start implementing any product we must explore it's reason to exist, what customers it benefits and ultimately how it can help your customers (not you!) make money.
In this workshop we will take an example and go through a simple process that helps us explore a product idea to the point that a spec is just a reference, but the product comes alive in the minds of the team members.
Business Agility - taking advantage of an agile R&DVasco Duarte
Many companies have jumped on the Agile bandwagon. That's good, but what for? In this talk we explore the consequences and possible benefits of adopting Agile for your Business. It's not enough to benefit your R&D, we need to learn how Agile can help our whole company.
A paradigm shift for testing - how to increase productivity 10x!Vasco Duarte
European IT industry need to deal with a huge salary gap with developing countries.
How can we increase our productivity and quality to compensate for the salary differences? This is a systems-thinking / Lean based approach to that problem
Patterns of agility, how to recognize and agile project when you see oneVasco Duarte
Presentation at Scan-Agile 2011 and Agile Riga Day 2011 about how to recognize what type of project you are in, and how to improve it towards a more agile, responsive, higher quality project
How do you know you are ready to start iterating? In some cases, very little is needed before the first iteration. In other cases, rushing to iterate (because you were told to) can lead to weeks of time wasted overly focused on delivering a poorly understood product.
This tutorial provides concrete tools for discovering your product context and assessing whether you are ready to start building and / or iterating. Participants will learn tools for defining how much process you need and tools for truly understanding what you are building and why, as well as who will use it, why they will (or will not) use it and why.
Self-Service Operations: Because Failure Still Happens (Developer Edition)Rundeck
Keynote presentation at DevNet Create 2017 by Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck.
Agile and DevOps have provided plenty of lessons for how to speed up the pace of application delivery and the frequency of application deployment. But delivery and deployment only covers one part of the day-to-day life of developers in large enterprises. What about what happens after deployment? In many enterprises, increasing the pace of delivery and frequency of deployment has just increased the operational support load, work interrupts, and context switching that were already cutting deeply into development teams' time.
This talk will focus on the successful design patterns that high-performing, large scale organizations have applied to reduce the operational burden and support costs across their entire organization. Specifically, we’ll look at how they apply DevOps principles to improving the post-deployment lifecycle and how Developers play the key role in reducing the difficultly and cost of operations activity for everyone.
Estimations, Expectations, and Evolution During a Project's Journey from RFP ...Rick Manelius
This talk was presented at Drupalcon Nashville on April 12th, 2018. See talk overview and recording at this URL. https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/estimates-expectations-and-evolution-during-projects-journey-rfp-release
Helping Ops Help You: Development’s Role in Enabling Self-Service OperationsRundeck
Presented by Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck, at JAX DevOps and Finance London, April 5, 2017.
DevOps has provided plenty of lessons for how to speed up the pace of delivery and frequency of deployments. But, delivery and deployment only covers one part of the day-to-day life for developers in large enterprises.
What about what happens after deployment? In most cases, increasing the pace of delivery and frequency of deployment just increases the operational support load, work interrupts, and context switching that has always cut deeply into a development team’s time.
This talk focuses on the successful design patterns that high-performing, large scale organizations have applied to reduce the operational burden and support costs across their entire organization. Specifically, we’ll look at how they apply DevOps principles to improving the post-deployment lifecycle and how Developers play the key role in reducing the difficultly and cost of operations activity for everyone.
See a Demo of Rundeck Enterprise :
https://www.rundeck.com/see-demo
--or--
Download Rundeck Open Source here:
https://rundeck.com/open-source
Connect:
Stack Overflow community: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rundeck
Github: https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck/issues
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rundeck
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RundeckInc/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com › company › rundeck-inc
Agility at Scale: WebSphere’s Agile TransformationTechWell
In today's rapidly changing environment, organizations—both large and small—must quickly respond to shifting market requirements to remain competitive. To be successful, many are adopting agile development and continuous delivery methodologies to deliver software quickly, while keeping the quality and maintainability high. Several years ago the WebSphere Application Server development teams embarked on the journey from traditional waterfall development to agile. They are now expanding to use both agile and continuous delivery methodologies across their organization worldwide. Susan Hanson shares the challenges of working with a worldwide team across multiple time zones while shifting away from component-based teams. Learn how the team transformed their development processes, tools, and culture to better adapt to changing requirements. See how, by integrating tools, the team is able to have a complete lifecycle from customer-submitted requirements through planning, development, test, and delivery of these requirements back to the customers, allowing for continuous delivery of cloud-based services.
You want to integrate skilled testing and development work. But how do you accomplish this without developers accidentally subverting the testing process or testers becoming an obstruction? Efficient, deep testing requires “critical distance” from the development process, commitment and planning to build a testable product, dedication to uncovering the truth, responsiveness among team members, and often a skill set that developers alone—or testers alone—do not ordinarily possess. James Bach presents a model—a redesign of the famous Agile Testing Quadrants that distinguished between business vs. technical facing tests and supporting vs. critiquing―that frames these dynamics and helps teams think through the nature of development and testing roles and how they might blend, conflict, or support each other on an Agile project. James includes a brief discussion of the original Agile Testing Quadrants model, which the presenters believe has created much confusion about the role of testing in Agile.
DOES15 - Damon Edwards - DevOps Kaizen Practical Steps to Start & Sustain a T...Gene Kim
Damon Edwards, Managing Partner, DTO Solutions, Inc
We all love the aspirational DevOps talks about organizations achieving blistering speed and dazzling nimbleness, right? But what can you do when you look internally at your own organization and everything feels complicated, contentious, and stuck? How do you overcome the silos, the legacy, and the entrenched behaviors that are making your DevOps problems seem so intractable?
This talk is about how to start and sustain a DevOps transformations in large and complex organizations using a methodical — and totally reasonable — Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) approach. This talk isn’t about mythical silver bullets or vague philosophies. This talk is about taking a fresh look at proven Lean techniques and empowering teams to find and fix what is getting in the way.
You're organised, you love spreadsheets, you're a great cheerleader, you handle a backlog with superhero skills, and now you're faced with managing a Drupal project and everything just feels foreign. It's not you, it's Drupal. The mix of site building, front end development, backend development, and over 20,000 contributed modules makes project management for Drupal exceptionally frustrating for people who've not worked with Drupal before.
This session will cover:
- the basic Drupal development workflow (from a developer's perspective, but without using developer jargon)
writing useful tickets which developers can accomplish
- estimation tips for multi-discipline tickets (design / back end / front end)
- ideal team structures -- and what to do if you can't get them
Updated from DrupalCamp London to include the truisms I've learned about being a first-time project manager.
We have an awesome LeanTribe going here in Sweden! I attended the meeting held in Stockholm 2014-09-09 were the focus was on Project Management. I’ve turned my personal notes from this four hour event into this presentation.
I've spent the last years modelling complex businesses and Software Architectures with EventStorming. The original recipe evolved a lot from the initial one. This is EventStorming state of the art.
Cobis and Oikosofy 5 Innovation shots for the banking industryVasco Duarte
Banking is here to stay, but Banks may not. The incoming wave of technology companies dedicated to banking requires banks to consider what innovation strategy, and execution framework they will implement in the coming 5 years. SAFe - an Agile framework for the Enterprise - provides a proven approach to align teams, management, deploy strategy quickly and help teams and organizations focus on the high impact opportunities. This one-hour workshop will introduce the SAFe framework and explain how it can be used as a blueprint for building a culture of innovation that provides a proven method to implement strategies in an agile manner, and develop competitive businesses. From strategy definition to day-to-day execution.
What am I going to get from this course?
• What does a “Culture of Innovation” mean?
The Basics of what it is & how it works
• What are the Key Ingredients for building a culture of innovation?
Building teams, and teams of teams to scale adaptability and agility
Structured and proven approach, based on learnings in the banking industry all over the world
Understanding your customers wants, needs and aspirations
Measuring success and learning quickly with the right framework to speed up learning
• Creating an Innovation Strategy
From an idea to a real-life product in mere weeks. With a method that helps execute, and adapt
Innovation accounting, a radical approach to testing new products, services in a cost-effective and high impact mannero
Motivating innovation contributions at all levels of the organization with a method that empowers all employees to make a difference
Fast time-to-market with the framework to help measure the results and adapt based on near real-time market feedback
Agile localization as a business advantage workshopVasco Duarte
Was the release of your project ever delayed when localization problems were found too late? Or worst, delayed subsequent products because of this delay? Or the fact that UI specifications quickly get out of date, leaving us with very poor quality testing by localization testing vendors. In most projects localization is still done in “waterfall” mode. Localization teams are typically involved at a very late stage of the development cycle.
We have lived through many of these problems, and we believe that Localization and Agile software development were born to be together
A quick trip to the future land of no estimatesVasco Duarte
Why do we estimate? What are the benefits we want to obtain with that practice? In this talk we'll explore the nature of estimates and offer an alternative: #NoEstimates. We'll look at some examples of how we can predict a release date of a project without any estimates, only relying on easily available data. Finally, we'll see how we can follow progress on a project at all times without having to rely on guesswork, and we will review how large, very large as well as small projects have already benefited from this in the past. At the end of the session you will be ready to start your own #NoEstimates journey, the next step in the #Agile journey.
Agile Innovation - Product Management in Turbulent timesVasco Duarte
In today’s world we are constantly confronted with the message that the competition is breeding down our necks, that the market and environment are changing and we need to change with them. And most importantly, we are told that we need to listen to our customers to be able to provide the right products.
We as a Product Managers need to be able to see beyond the basic product decisions, e.g. do we add feature A or feature B? We need to think beyond the silo of our function.
Agile Beyond the Hype! – What You Really Need to Know Before You Jump In Vasco Duarte
Many companies adopt Agile because it is the natural thing to do. But do they know what they are getting into? In this talk we will use some anecdotes and lessons learned from Agile adoption to build a model that will hopefully help our companies adopt Agile in a way that affects positively their business.
Questions we try to address will include: How does Agile affect functions outside development? How to bring the benefits of Agile to non-development functions? What can Agile affect my bottom line?
Instead of fighting about “who’s agile” or “who’s more agile than whom”, it would be useful to create a set of patterns, that once recognized would help us define if we are or have been able to successfully implement an Agile life-cycle for our project and portfolio.
In this session we will explore how it “feels” to work in an Agile project. It is not enough to do Scrum or Kanban, you need to know if you are doing it right.
Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2024 Orlando - lots of innovation and old challengesHolger Mueller
Holger Mueller of Constellation Research shares his key takeaways from SAP's Sapphire confernece, held in Orlando, June 3rd till 5th 2024, in the Orange Convention Center.
3.0 Project 2_ Developing My Brand Identity Kit.pptxtanyjahb
A personal brand exploration presentation summarizes an individual's unique qualities and goals, covering strengths, values, passions, and target audience. It helps individuals understand what makes them stand out, their desired image, and how they aim to achieve it.
B2B payments are rapidly changing. Find out the 5 key questions you need to be asking yourself to be sure you are mastering B2B payments today. Learn more at www.BlueSnap.com.
Cracking the Workplace Discipline Code Main.pptxWorkforce Group
Cultivating and maintaining discipline within teams is a critical differentiator for successful organisations.
Forward-thinking leaders and business managers understand the impact that discipline has on organisational success. A disciplined workforce operates with clarity, focus, and a shared understanding of expectations, ultimately driving better results, optimising productivity, and facilitating seamless collaboration.
Although discipline is not a one-size-fits-all approach, it can help create a work environment that encourages personal growth and accountability rather than solely relying on punitive measures.
In this deck, you will learn the significance of workplace discipline for organisational success. You’ll also learn
• Four (4) workplace discipline methods you should consider
• The best and most practical approach to implementing workplace discipline.
• Three (3) key tips to maintain a disciplined workplace.
Kseniya Leshchenko: Shared development support service model as the way to ma...Lviv Startup Club
Kseniya Leshchenko: Shared development support service model as the way to make small projects with small budgets profitable for the company (UA)
Kyiv PMDay 2024 Summer
Website – www.pmday.org
Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv
FB – https://www.facebook.com/pmdayconference
An introduction to the cryptocurrency investment platform Binance Savings.Any kyc Account
Learn how to use Binance Savings to expand your bitcoin holdings. Discover how to maximize your earnings on one of the most reliable cryptocurrency exchange platforms, as well as how to earn interest on your cryptocurrency holdings and the various savings choices available.
Personal Brand Statement:
As an Army veteran dedicated to lifelong learning, I bring a disciplined, strategic mindset to my pursuits. I am constantly expanding my knowledge to innovate and lead effectively. My journey is driven by a commitment to excellence, and to make a meaningful impact in the world.
"𝑩𝑬𝑮𝑼𝑵 𝑾𝑰𝑻𝑯 𝑻𝑱 𝑰𝑺 𝑯𝑨𝑳𝑭 𝑫𝑶𝑵𝑬"
𝐓𝐉 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐬 (𝐓𝐉 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬) is a professional event agency that includes experts in the event-organizing market in Vietnam, Korea, and ASEAN countries. We provide unlimited types of events from Music concerts, Fan meetings, and Culture festivals to Corporate events, Internal company events, Golf tournaments, MICE events, and Exhibitions.
𝐓𝐉 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐬 provides unlimited package services including such as Event organizing, Event planning, Event production, Manpower, PR marketing, Design 2D/3D, VIP protocols, Interpreter agency, etc.
Sports events - Golf competitions/billiards competitions/company sports events: dynamic and challenging
⭐ 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬:
➢ 2024 BAEKHYUN [Lonsdaleite] IN HO CHI MINH
➢ SUPER JUNIOR-L.S.S. THE SHOW : Th3ee Guys in HO CHI MINH
➢FreenBecky 1st Fan Meeting in Vietnam
➢CHILDREN ART EXHIBITION 2024: BEYOND BARRIERS
➢ WOW K-Music Festival 2023
➢ Winner [CROSS] Tour in HCM
➢ Super Show 9 in HCM with Super Junior
➢ HCMC - Gyeongsangbuk-do Culture and Tourism Festival
➢ Korean Vietnam Partnership - Fair with LG
➢ Korean President visits Samsung Electronics R&D Center
➢ Vietnam Food Expo with Lotte Wellfood
"𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲, 𝐚 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲. 𝐖𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬."
Affordable Stationery Printing Services in Jaipur | Navpack n PrintNavpack & Print
Looking for professional printing services in Jaipur? Navpack n Print offers high-quality and affordable stationery printing for all your business needs. Stand out with custom stationery designs and fast turnaround times. Contact us today for a quote!
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey throu...dylandmeas
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey through Full Sail University. Below, you’ll find a collection of my work showcasing my skills and expertise in digital marketing, event planning, and media production.
23. A Software Development Processs scales if (and only if) the work it takes to manage a project increases at a slower pace than the amount of work being managed!
24. Relative Effort needed to manage a project when the project size increases Effort to Manage Does not Scale Neutral Scales Work being managed
26. Experiment Count “things” to manage Assess effort needed to manage those “things” If work to manage them increases faster than the number of things => process does not exhibit the property of Scalability
27. Growth in effort to manage those “things” Growth in number of “things” >
41. N Requirements organization in Agile 1 Portfolio Items – Customer marketable Epics Longer term planning (more than 1 iteration) 10 Features Where the rubber meets the road – what we do in one iteration User Stories 100
42. Different content abstractions for different stakeholders Product Marketing and Portfolio Portfolio Items – Customer marketable Epics Longer term planning (more than 1 iteration) Product Owner + Architect + UX Features Where the rubber meets the road – what we do in one iteration User Stories Team + Product Owner
43. As a Project Manager I want … 1 Epics 10 Features User Stories 100
44. As a Project Manager I want … 1 Epics 10 Features Less stuff to manage, so that I can keep my sanity!
45. Effort to manage N requirements with an Agile Requirements model Nx/102 Where N = number of requirements/user stories
46. The mental sanity graph…(BTW: lower = better) Waterfall Effort to Manage This is the difference between Agile and Waterfall The bigger the project gets… Where you want to be: Work being managed
55. Currently an Agile Coach in Nokia, Vasco Duarte is an experienced product and project manager, having worked in the software industry since 1997. Vasco has also been an Agile practitioner since 2004, he is one of the leaders and a catalyst in the adoption of Agile methods and an Agile culture at Nokia and previously at F-Secure. Vasco's humble contributions to the improvement of the software development profession can be read in his blog: http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.blogspot.com. You can follow Vasco on twitter: @duarte_vasco Foto credits: Flickr users http://www.flickr.com/photos/8867029@N07/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/_at/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/quenerapu/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/privatenobby/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/swamibu/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesbooth/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dungodung/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/puppydogbites/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/talios/
Editor's Notes
In 2003, back in the time when I started working in Agile SW development projects there’s one comment I heard over and over again. And that was: “sure, Agile is ok for small projects that could, anyway be managed with any process, but they just don’t work for any project that has more than 7+-2 people!”
And this message was so often repeated that we ended up believing it and applying Agile to small projects only. The projects that couldn’t fail we were told.Now, 6 years on to my personal journey as an Agilist I know better. Agile can scale to teams larger than 7+-2 people.
Heck, agile can scale to teams larger than 7000+-2000 people (or more).
But you did not come here to hear this. You knew I was going to say this when you read the title of this talk. You came here to hear about “how”. How does Agile scale to such large groups? How does Agile scale to develop software systems that have several 10’s of millions of lines of code?
Before we can dive into this we need to understand that scaling means.While researching this presentation it was really hard to find a definition for “scaling” in the context of Software Projects
Some literature refers to Large Scale Scrum (Larman, Bas), but does not particularly define how Scrum scales, just illustrates practices you can use
others use the term “Scale Scrum” (Schwaber) without explaining what “scale” means (as a verb)
and others even the term “Multi-team projects” (Cohn), but this is a bad definition because I’ve literally never seen a product project with just one team, there’s always sales, marketing, it, localization, documentation on top of the development staff, which in most cases is also in multiple teams.
Others, again prefer to talk about “distributed” development. This talks about one of the properties of large scale but does not help us define what “scaling agile mean” (except that it must work in a distributed environment…)
So, to start us off today I’ll present what I mean by “scaling”. Something that can helps us have a proper conversation to try and answer the question: “Does Agile SW Development scale?”.None of the information in those books really helped answer the question: “what does it mean to scale Agile SW development”?Well, we know it is about larger groups of people interacting to produce what we expect to be a “product” or “service” based on software, or even custom-software. I’ll focus on Product focused software development because that’s the area that I’m most interested in. Some of this will also apply to other type of projects, but I won’t focus too much on that.
Let’s start with the easy question. What does scaling mean? I’ll assume that scaling is a property of a development process. As in “this process scales to a large group of people” or as in “this process can work for many teams working together on a project”.But that’s not enough. That property must give us some advantage over other methods that do not exhibit that property. Here is where the definition gets interesting. Here’s my proposal.
I propose that a Software Development method scales if and only if (necessary condition): The work it takes to manage a project increases slower than the work that is being managed.
Here’s a visual representation:
Now that we got the definition clear we are equipped to devise a way to test our definition. One easy way to do that is to count how many “things” we need to keep track of to be able to manage our hypothetical software development project.I’ll propose that the property of scalability needs to apply to all “things” we need to manage in a project. This is not strictly true, but provides us with an easy way to evaluate if a method can or cannot scale. This is because, if the effort we need to manage some “things” increases at the same or higher rate than the number of “things”, that method does not scale for that “thing”, once we find a “thing” for which a method does not work we have confirmation that the method does not scale as previously defined.So, now we can devise an experiment to check if a certain method “scales”:
Explain experiment (read)
This is what we need to get in order to have scalability in the processLet’s look at how typically waterfall projects do Requirements Management.
They will start with listing all of the requirements that need to be implemented (in a requirements document) and then they will ensure that each of those requirements gets implemented.
Assuming that it takes x effort to manage 1 requirement, it follows that…
it will take Nx to manage N requirements. This is because what we have is a flat list of requirements. But….
What about dependencies?
Read
If on top of this we had that it will take us y effort to manage one dependency from one requirement to another, then we have the formula (note: this is an approximate model, reality can be a bit more difficult to define mathematically!)
This gives us this effort graph
What does this mean? The traditional and waterfall approach to manage requirements does not scale. But, then again, this should come as no surprise because if you have been doing software project for a while you already know that you don’t actually manage the dependencies very well.
So, we have so far established that waterfall projects with their approach to managing individual requirements does not scale for at least this key practice in software development which is Requirements Management.But now we should prove that on the other hand Agile does scale. So let’s get back to requirements management.
In our project we have a total of N requirementsBut in effect as a project manager for a large Agile project you don’t actually manage those requirements. In Agile we would call those User Stories. They are the most relevant at the team level because they express details of the system that require deep technical or otherwise architectural knowledge. Project Managers don’t have that knowledge, so the User Stories are delegated to the individual teams who manage them together with the Product Owners. So, in Agile we establish a hierarchy of requirements. Not all requirements are created equal.
The model I am using currently is based on Dean Leffingwell’s Agile and Lean Requirements model which you can find here: http://www.sep.com/lk2009/dean-leffingwell-a-lean-and-scalable-requirements-information-model-for-agile-enterprises/What this model says is this: In any large scale software effort you will have many people involved, not all interested in the same level of detail, and not all details serve the different purposes that they need to serve: Portfolio management, Customer understanding, Progress follow-up, etc.
So, this model effectively defines 3 levels of requirements: Epics – What are Epics, and why are they there?Features – what are Features and why are they there?Stories – What are Stories and why are they there?
Each of these levels is an abstraction from the previous. So Epics are an abstraction from Features and they cover the Portfolio level. What value do we want to deliver to our users. It is feasible to follow progress at the Epic level, but that is not appropriate for Product Owners, who will mostly focus on Features, and teams will focus on Stories.
These levels of abstraction allow the organization entities to focus on managing only the appropriate set of requirements that they need to get their job done.
Typically there a few orders of magnitude in number of items between the different levels, so one Epic may have 10-100 Features and each Feature may have 10-100 Stories.
Therefore Project Managers can concentrate on a feasible amount of things to manage. At the right level with the right level of information.
So, going back to the formula this gives us the following:If you are project manager for a large project you will be following up and managing the Epics for the overall project, which leads to an effort like this (N = Stories) Nx/102
Note how the effort we spend (vertical axis) grows at a much slower pace than the number of Stories that need to be managed (horizontal axis).Why is this possible?
We have Product Owners and Team Representatives who will manage a subset of features and will come together on a regular basis to agree on how to handle the dependencies between those. Once that is clear they go back to the team and do the detailed planning, where Stories are created. Stories are mostly managed by ScrumMasters+Teams in their daily work.What is happening here is that decisions and detailed work management are being delegated to the teams. And this is the key property of this system that enables us to run extremely large projects (Someone said the largest projects he had ever seen anywhere) with minimal amount of effort. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a huge amount of effort, but it is infinitely lower than if we would be using waterfall.
The funny thing in this is that, when we look around, we are not using anything that has not been done before. Take the London Olympics for example: huge project. How do they manage it? They have teams for the different interest areas, each area is clearly defined and has limited dependencies to other areas (venues, transportation, accommodation, marketing, etc.) and they have some common meeting where they tackle those dependencies. It would be lunacy to ask the London Olympics project manager to manage the construction of the new Stadium, the construction of new metro/train lines, the Olympic village and still run-around the world promoting the games. It is lunacy, but that is what many projects have today. A centralized project management team that oversees the implementation of all of the requirements, in effect they “control” the project, not “manage”, but “control”. There is a clear and expensive difference.
So, to finalize this presentation I’d like to re-visit some of the practices that help us cope with the scale of our projects and may be helpful to you when dealing with the same issue.First, let me start by telling you that “size does matter”. We cannot use the same techniques for all sizes of projects. You should be careful at selecting techniques that fit your needs. Don’t create solutions to problems you don’t have!In large scale projects one of the most important things to realize is that the project management team cannot be the decision maker for all decisions in the project. The requirements model that we saw already points to this issue in the specific area of requirements management, but this principle or pattern applies to many other areas. Always enable decisions to be made at the lowest possible level in the organization.
There’s this example of that MalcomGladwell presents in his book: “Blink, the power of thinking without thinking”. In this example he tells us the story of a war games exercise done by the american military. They were preparing for a war in the middle east (which I guess is no state secret anymore). For that exercise they had equipped the “good” guys (or Blue team) with all of the latest technology, snooping, battle field satelite recognition, instant and continuous GPS positioning of their own troops. The blue team had complete access to everything through their technology superiority. On the other hand, they chose a veteran from the Vietnam war to be the enemy leader. Paul Van Riper was a person that did not believe in technology, he believed that you cannot really “know” what is going on by collecting huge ammounts of information. Van Riper was convinced that war is too complex, to non-linear to be neatly managed from a bunker with lots of tech gizmos.
Once the war games started Van Riper’s Red Team did exactly the opposite of what the Blue Team expected. He had ordered his soldiers to keep radio silence at all times, so that their communications could not be heard by the Blue Team. Each platoon of the Red Team was given a set of targets that they would need to define how to achieve based on their own assessment of the terrain, and the position of other teams in the field of combat.The result was a massive surprise to the Blue Team. They were lost. There was no radio communication to listen in, there was almost no activity as far as they could tell, and suddenly the Red Team sprang into action.
Once they had reached their positions they lauched a massive attack on the Blue Team positions, missiles, suicide attacks, etc. The Blue Team could no longer respond, and the game was stopped. What can we learn from this story? Simple, give everybody clear targets, announce the synchronization points and let the specialists do what they do better, make decisions when they need them, instead of waiting for orders from some centralized command center we used to call project management.
There are other techniques you can use. I’ll mention only one more: Visual ManagementOne of the most effective techniques we use to manage our large projects is a common planning session where we effectively show to each other what we are planning to do based on a set of objectives set at the highest project level. In this session we will spend most of our time communicating and solving possible synchronization or coordination problems between the different teams involved.In this session we have representatives for all groups in the organization (not each team), and to prepare for this session, the group leaders will have meetings with the teams to review and plan how to achieve the objectives for the next period/iteration. The key aspect in this session is that it is held face-to-face, as that is the only effective way to handle a large number of issues in a short time-frame.