12 suggestions for how to convince traditional clients to agree to an Agile project plan. Presented by Arin Sime of OpenSource Connections at Agile 2009 in Chicago.
All agile development begins with the sales process. Internally, adopting agile approaches require the support of top management and project managers. External clients have to be sold on the agile approach and convinced to sign a contract that allow for agile development. Sales teams have to be able to convince external clients that the agile approach is the best for their project.
Paul Klipp has been selling the agile process internally and to outside clients since 2004 with considerable success. In this presentation, he'll discuss how to sell the benefits of agile development to internal stakeholders and to outside clients and will provide an overview of different approaches to agile contracts.
Introduction to Agile Project Management and ScrumVoximate
Brief introduction to Agile Project Management and Scrum covering user stories, story points, use of Fibonacci sequence values for story points, release planning, sprints, capacity, velocity, sprint commit meetings, sprint review meetings, and burndown charts. Explains the importance of returning the product to a potentially shippable state at the end of each sprint to reduce the accumulation of technical debt and keep the assessment of project progress realistic. Summarizes the roles in Scrum of the Product Owner (who writes or facilitates the writing by customers of user stories), the ScrumMaster (who manages the Scrum), and the Team (who do the work). Discusses values and best practices in Agile/Extreme Programming ("XP") values. Explains daily standup meeting in which people share what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and any blocking issues they're encountering. Summarizes common problems with waterfall project management including a serialized process, longer time to market, isolation of developers from customer needs, plans falling out of synch with reality, lack of visibility into rate of progress, features being slashed late in the development cycle to bring in release dates, long time to project completion, late feedback from customers, projects falling behind schedule, and projects missing their market window or being killed before launch. Summaries problems with monolithic product requirements documents including length, lack of readability, disconnection from customer needs, and lack of clarity about which features are for which customers.
All agile development begins with the sales process. Internally, adopting agile approaches require the support of top management and project managers. External clients have to be sold on the agile approach and convinced to sign a contract that allow for agile development. Sales teams have to be able to convince external clients that the agile approach is the best for their project.
Paul Klipp has been selling the agile process internally and to outside clients since 2004 with considerable success. In this presentation, he'll discuss how to sell the benefits of agile development to internal stakeholders and to outside clients and will provide an overview of different approaches to agile contracts.
Introduction to Agile Project Management and ScrumVoximate
Brief introduction to Agile Project Management and Scrum covering user stories, story points, use of Fibonacci sequence values for story points, release planning, sprints, capacity, velocity, sprint commit meetings, sprint review meetings, and burndown charts. Explains the importance of returning the product to a potentially shippable state at the end of each sprint to reduce the accumulation of technical debt and keep the assessment of project progress realistic. Summarizes the roles in Scrum of the Product Owner (who writes or facilitates the writing by customers of user stories), the ScrumMaster (who manages the Scrum), and the Team (who do the work). Discusses values and best practices in Agile/Extreme Programming ("XP") values. Explains daily standup meeting in which people share what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and any blocking issues they're encountering. Summarizes common problems with waterfall project management including a serialized process, longer time to market, isolation of developers from customer needs, plans falling out of synch with reality, lack of visibility into rate of progress, features being slashed late in the development cycle to bring in release dates, long time to project completion, late feedback from customers, projects falling behind schedule, and projects missing their market window or being killed before launch. Summaries problems with monolithic product requirements documents including length, lack of readability, disconnection from customer needs, and lack of clarity about which features are for which customers.
Agile Anti-Patterns. Yes your agile projects can and will fail too.Sander Hoogendoorn
This is the slide deck for a smooth presentation on agile and agile anti-patterns I did recently at several international conferences, including GIDS (Bangalore), ACCU (Oxford), Camp Digital (Manchester), Agile Open Holland (Dieren) and Jazoon (Zurich).
Collaboration Through Conflict - SFAA 2013Mark Kilby
Session at South FL's first agile conference where we talked about the 5 sources of conflict and various tools to help your team navigate it for better collaboration
The Scrum Master and the Product Owner are critical to success of agile development teams using Scrum with the authority to make changes to the process, suggest team members take action, and empower members to do tasks correctly, in support of increasing the probability of project success.
Transitioning to Scrum is not easy, and for many, distributed teams are the most difficult to manage. In trying to make Scrum work with a geographically dispersed team, increasing efficiency requires adjustments to processes and effective communication and collaboration.
This webinar will provide guidance for proper planning and managing, in order to get your distributed teams working smoothly throughout the scrum processes. Dr. Kevin Thompson, cPrime’s Agile Practice Lead, will address key issues such as:
• How to have scrum meetings for distributed teams (daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint review, retrospective)
• How to cope with time-zone differences
• How to cope with language differences
• Best practices for collaborating in a distributed team
• Best practices for tools that mitigate distributed team impact
Presentation to Lonetree PMI Roundtable on August 27, 2008.
Abstract:
According to the Wall Street Journal agile development has "crossed the chasm." Why then are there still strong pockets of intense resistance to agile? This presentation takes a look at some of the most common misconceptions about agile development. It exposes the truth behind the myths and backs up many of the points with actual industry data. In the process, a basic business case for agility is created. The goal of this session is for all participants to leave with the knowledge necessary to answer the question "Why Agile?" In addition, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the realities of agile development and how it can help organizations.
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
We all know, given the right mindset, that Agile approaches are a great way to get results and for people to go home feeling that they have contributed.
But no one really asks why. Why does it work?
This presentation, given at the Agile Business Conference in London in 2013 provides a collection of Agile-independant thoughts and ideas to make people think.
Above all, it provides some take aways to help judge if the team has a solid understanding of purpose and if the team is just well, how can on say, "dysfunctional".
Managing client expectations of agile in commercial software projectsMSM Software
The word ‘agile’ has become one of those software development buzzwords that people use but do not fully understand. So how do you manage expectations for clients who are new to agile or do not fully understand the agile methodology? And, does agile work for every project? This session considers how to define an agile project methodology that fits client needs and will deliver project success.
This presentation was first presented by Steve Adams at Agile on the Beach.
Slides from my talk at http://2015.nuxconf.uk. Manchester, UK, October 2015.
Synopsis
Have you ever heard of Clients from Hell – the website that cites hellish stories designers collect over a lifetime of working with clients? If you haven’t, many of the situations described on the site won’t be foreign to you: clients who believe theirs is the only opinion that matters, who tell you which colors to use and ask to “make the logo bigger,” and who just don’t seem to get their head around what UX truly means. Clients being difficult is a well-known cliche in the design world.
There’s another side to all this: clients are also people who are deeply embedded within organizations we can help with our proficiency in design-thinking and user-centered design. They know their jobs, customers, and organizations so well that if we could just see eye to eye, we could make real impact together.
In her talk, Jenny will explore some insights from over a decade of working with clients. She will share practical examples of hands-on methods to explain, teach, and inspire user-centered thinking in clients who “just don’t get it.”
Agile Anti-Patterns. Yes your agile projects can and will fail too.Sander Hoogendoorn
This is the slide deck for a smooth presentation on agile and agile anti-patterns I did recently at several international conferences, including GIDS (Bangalore), ACCU (Oxford), Camp Digital (Manchester), Agile Open Holland (Dieren) and Jazoon (Zurich).
Collaboration Through Conflict - SFAA 2013Mark Kilby
Session at South FL's first agile conference where we talked about the 5 sources of conflict and various tools to help your team navigate it for better collaboration
The Scrum Master and the Product Owner are critical to success of agile development teams using Scrum with the authority to make changes to the process, suggest team members take action, and empower members to do tasks correctly, in support of increasing the probability of project success.
Transitioning to Scrum is not easy, and for many, distributed teams are the most difficult to manage. In trying to make Scrum work with a geographically dispersed team, increasing efficiency requires adjustments to processes and effective communication and collaboration.
This webinar will provide guidance for proper planning and managing, in order to get your distributed teams working smoothly throughout the scrum processes. Dr. Kevin Thompson, cPrime’s Agile Practice Lead, will address key issues such as:
• How to have scrum meetings for distributed teams (daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint review, retrospective)
• How to cope with time-zone differences
• How to cope with language differences
• Best practices for collaborating in a distributed team
• Best practices for tools that mitigate distributed team impact
Presentation to Lonetree PMI Roundtable on August 27, 2008.
Abstract:
According to the Wall Street Journal agile development has "crossed the chasm." Why then are there still strong pockets of intense resistance to agile? This presentation takes a look at some of the most common misconceptions about agile development. It exposes the truth behind the myths and backs up many of the points with actual industry data. In the process, a basic business case for agility is created. The goal of this session is for all participants to leave with the knowledge necessary to answer the question "Why Agile?" In addition, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the realities of agile development and how it can help organizations.
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
We all know, given the right mindset, that Agile approaches are a great way to get results and for people to go home feeling that they have contributed.
But no one really asks why. Why does it work?
This presentation, given at the Agile Business Conference in London in 2013 provides a collection of Agile-independant thoughts and ideas to make people think.
Above all, it provides some take aways to help judge if the team has a solid understanding of purpose and if the team is just well, how can on say, "dysfunctional".
Managing client expectations of agile in commercial software projectsMSM Software
The word ‘agile’ has become one of those software development buzzwords that people use but do not fully understand. So how do you manage expectations for clients who are new to agile or do not fully understand the agile methodology? And, does agile work for every project? This session considers how to define an agile project methodology that fits client needs and will deliver project success.
This presentation was first presented by Steve Adams at Agile on the Beach.
Slides from my talk at http://2015.nuxconf.uk. Manchester, UK, October 2015.
Synopsis
Have you ever heard of Clients from Hell – the website that cites hellish stories designers collect over a lifetime of working with clients? If you haven’t, many of the situations described on the site won’t be foreign to you: clients who believe theirs is the only opinion that matters, who tell you which colors to use and ask to “make the logo bigger,” and who just don’t seem to get their head around what UX truly means. Clients being difficult is a well-known cliche in the design world.
There’s another side to all this: clients are also people who are deeply embedded within organizations we can help with our proficiency in design-thinking and user-centered design. They know their jobs, customers, and organizations so well that if we could just see eye to eye, we could make real impact together.
In her talk, Jenny will explore some insights from over a decade of working with clients. She will share practical examples of hands-on methods to explain, teach, and inspire user-centered thinking in clients who “just don’t get it.”
After an introduction to the basic tenets of Agile and some Agile practices, this presentation to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) talks about ways to convince your organization or clients to use Agile software development practices. Based on a presentation given at Agile 2009 by Arin Sime, Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections.
The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001 and much has changed since then. Read on for an opportunity to rethink the Agile Manifesto. View Agile in a new light and deconstruct which concepts were home runs and which still need to evolve.
A look at the options available to companies when delivering development services using Agile methods.
October 2014 - Presentation to Agile4Agencies, London.
November 2014 - Updated for Skills Matter, London
Talk by Joakim Sundén and Anders Ivarsson about agile and scaling agile at Spotify. These particular slides are from a Kanban Open Space event in Ghent, Belgium, February 2013.
AgileCville: How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project planOpenSource Connections
Presentation given to AgileCville on 7/16/2009, describing different strategies for convincing a traditional software development client to use an Agile project plan. Presented by Arin Sime, Senior Consultant to OpenSource Connections in Charlottesville Virginia.
Overview of Agile for Business AnalystsSally Elatta
This seminar was presented to the IIBA Omaha group. My goal was to provide a quick overview of Agile and then dive into the role and skills needed for a BA on an Agile team. Let me know if you would like me to present this or a similar topic at your organization. sally@agiletransformation.com
Overview of agile values
This presentation shows some core concepts that make agile software development different.
This will help your team familiar with agile concepts and start boosting your team performance.
Managing international software projects interactively using scrumPeter Horsten
Too many projects are not (fully) successful. In many cases this is caused by issues in the management approach. Clients want to know what they get for a fixed budget. But we all know it's almost impossible to fully specify what you need.
An Agile software approach proved to work for us. After implementing Scrum our projects went more smooth and we were more often delivering the right results on time.
It took time to get this working. For developers it was a bit scary and for our clients it meant they really had to trust us. Today we can see our effort pays off. We wouldn't like to go back to waterfall times anymore.
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
General introduction to agile practices like Scrum and Kanban. Also covers what situations Agile is best at, what situations Agile doesn't help with, and what an Agile team should look like. This deck is a general intro to Agile for OpenSource Connections clients.
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective ActionsTechWell
Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to a failing project. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.
Smarter search drives value to your business. Delivering search that matches users to the right content is what you care about. But organizations often get stuck getting there. It turns out that you need quite a number of very different ingredients to deliver tremendous search. It can make your head spin! To help you think through where your team is on its road to smarter search, Pugh introduces the maturity model used by OpenSource Connections and walks you through a very concrete method to inventory needed skills and translate that into search roles for your team. He shows how to measure your capabilities in key areas of search to drive better ROI from search.
The right path to making search relevant - Taxonomy Bootcamp London 2019OpenSource Connections
Three aspects of search quality; focusing on relevance; why this is not just a technology problem; measuring search maturity & relevance; open source tools and techniques; Solr and Elasticsearch
Payloads have been a powerful aspect of Lucene for a long time, but have only had limited exposure in Solr. The Tika project has only recently finished integrating the powerful Tesseract OCR library, bringing the prospect of OCR to the masses.
Haystack 2019 - Search-based recommendations at Politico - Ryan KohlOpenSource Connections
Over the past year, the POLITICO team has developed a recommendation system for our users, which recommends not only news content to read but also news topics to subscribe to. This talk will discuss our development path, including dead-ends and performance trade-offs. In the end, the team produced a system based on search technology (in our case, Elasticsearch) and refined by machine learning techniques to achieve a balance between personalization and serendipity.
With the advent of deep learning and algorithms like word2vec and doc2vec, vectors-based representations are increasingly being used in search to represent anything from documents to images and products. However, search engines work with documents made of tokens, and not vectors, and are typically not designed for fast vector matching out of the box. In this talk, I will give an overview of how vectors can be derived from documents to produce a semantic representation of a document that can be used to implement semantic / conceptual search without hurting performance. I will then describe a few different techniques for efficiently searching vector-based representations in an inverted index, including LSH, vector quantization and k-means tree, and compare their performance in terms of speed and relevancy. Finally, I will describe how each technique can be implemented efficiently in a lucene-based search engine such as Solr or Elastic Search.
Haystack 2019 - Natural Language Search with Knowledge Graphs - Trey GraingerOpenSource Connections
To optimally interpret most natural language queries, it is necessary to understand the phrases, entities, commands, and relationships represented or implied within the search. Knowledge graphs serve as useful instantiations of ontologies which can help represent this kind of knowledge within a domain.
In this talk, we'll walk through techniques to build knowledge graphs automatically from your own domain-specific content, how you can update and edit the nodes and relationships, and how you can seamlessly integrate them into your search solution for enhanced query interpretation and semantic search. We'll have some fun with some of the more search-centric use cased of knowledge graphs, such as entity extraction, query expansion, disambiguation, and pattern identification within our queries: for example, transforming the query "bbq near haystack" into
{ filter:["doc_type":"restaurant"], "query": { "boost": { "b": "recip(geodist(38.034780,-78.486790),1,1000,1000)", "query": "bbq OR barbeque OR barbecue" } } }
We'll also specifically cover use of the Semantic Knowledge Graph, a particularly interesting knowledge graph implementation available within Apache Solr that can be auto-generated from your own domain-specific content and which provides highly-nuanced, contextual interpretation of all of the terms, phrases and entities within your domain. We'll see a live demo with real world data demonstrating how you can build and apply your own knowledge graphs to power much more relevant query understanding within your search engine.
For e-commerce applications, matching users with the items they want is the name of the game. If they can't find what they want then how can they buy anything?! Typically this functionality is provided through search and browse experience. Search allows users to type in text and match against the text of the items in the inventory. Browse allows users to select filters and slice-and-dice the inventory down to the subset they are interested in. But with the shift toward mobile devices, no one wants to type anymore - thus browse is becoming dominant in the e-commerce experience.
But there's a problem! What if your inventory is not categorized? Perhaps your inventory is user generated or generated by external providers who don't tag and categorize the inventory. No categories and no tags means no browse experience and missed sales. You could hire an army of taxonomists and curators to tag items - but training and curation will be expensive. You can demand that your providers tag their items and adhere to your taxonomy - but providers will buck this new requirement unless they see obvious and immediate benefit. Worse, providers might use tags to game the system - artificially placing themselves in the wrong category to drive more sales. Worst of all, creating the right taxonomy is hard. You have to structure a taxonomy to realistically represent how your customers think about the inventory.
Eventbrite is investigating a tantalizing alternative: using a combination of customer interactions and machine learning to automatically tag and categorize our inventory. As customers interact with our platform - as they search for events and click on and purchase events that interest them - we implicitly gather information about how our users think about our inventory. Search text effectively acts like a tag and a click on an event card is a vote for that clicked event is representative of that tag. We are able to use this stream of information as training data for a machine learning classification model; and as we receive new inventory, we can automatically tag it with the text that customers will likely use when searching for it. This makes it possible to better understand our inventory, our supply and demand, and most importantly this allows us to build the browse experience that customers demand.
In this talk I will explain in depth the problem space and Eventbrite's approach in solving the problem. I will describe how we gathered training data from our search and click logs, and how we built and refined the model. I will present the output of the model and discuss both the positive results of our work as well as the work left to be done. Those attending this talk will leave with some new ideas to take back to their own business.
Haystack 2019 - Improving Search Relevance with Numeric Features in Elasticse...OpenSource Connections
Recently Elasticsearch has introduced a number of ways to improve search relevance of your documents based on numeric features. In this talk I will present the newly introduced field types of "rank_feature", "rank_features" ,"dense_field", and "sparse_vector" and discuss in what situations and how they can be used to boost scores of your documents. I will also talk about the inner workings of queries based on these fields, and related performance considerations.
Haystack 2019 - Architectural considerations on search relevancy in the conte...OpenSource Connections
With an increasing amount of relevancy factors, relevancy fine-tuning becomes more complex as changing the impact of factors produces increasingly more unintended side effects. In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about how learning algorithms can replace manual relevancy fine-tuning in order to manage this complexity. However, discussions about the challenge of relevancy should additionally consider architectural aspects. Especially microservice-based architectures provide many ways to encapsulate and to separate complexities of search solutions, which facilitates optimizing the search as well as locating and fixing problems.
Generally, relevancy factors can be assigned to three different groups, each handled at a different stage of the search request processing. The first group contains contextual factors that depend on certain characteristics of a query, such as query-related boosts lifting up top-sellers for queries or category-related boosts to distinguish products from their accessories. Such contextual factors can be handled as a step of the preprocessing of queries. The respective boosting information can simply be appended to the query before it is actually sent to the search engine. Ideally, the normalization of the query is done beforehand.
The second group contains factors that are considered for all queries in more or less the same way, e. g. a ranking function basing on keyword occurrences, product topicality or sales in total. Factors related to this group can be handled directly by configuring the search engine.
The third group contains situational factors. For instance, a certain product might be a good match for a certain query in general, but for situational circumstances it should not appear among the top five products (e. g. because it is out of stock). Such situational factors can be handled by resorting result sets, after they were returned by the search engine.
The handling of the different factors within successive stages of search request processing will be discussed from an architectural perspective. Implications for applying learning algorithms and the implementation of a personalized search will be considered.
Does your search application include a custom query syntax with various search operators such as Booleans, proximity, term or phrase frequency, capitalization, quoted text or as-is operator, and other advanced operators? Although most search applications offer a natural language-oriented search box, some advanced applications may also offer a custom query syntax for advanced users or automated tasks. The Lucene "classic" query operators that are supported by the Solr edismax query parser (Boolean, phrase with slop, wildcard, etc.) cover a good amount of use cases, but they only get you so far. In this talk, we will explore various strategies to support a custom and advanced query syntax in Solr, covering a spectrum of options from leveraging the out-of-the-box Solr query DSL, to a custom Solr query parser, and hybrid solutions in between. We will identify the options' pros and cons, discuss relevancy considerations, and illustrate the options in Java.
Haystack 2019 - Establishing a relevance focused culture in a large organizat...OpenSource Connections
For a relevance engineer one of the most difficult tasks in the tuning process is to convince others in the organization that this is a joint effort. Even the brightest search guru doesn't get very far when working in isolation, so establishing cross-collaboration through the organization is essential. But how to get there?
On top of that, in a large organization a relevance engineer often works on multiple seemingly unrelated search projects. The challenge is not to get drowned in building custom solutions for each project, but to design generic and re-usable strategies which solve many problems at once.
In this session we'll discuss how to build a widely supported basis for search quality improvements in an organization. It is full of practical tips and examples which could help you in establishing a cross-functional culture that is optimal for relevance tuning. It also zooms in on an holistic approach of solving multiple equivalent search issues at once.
Haystack 2019 - Solving for Satisfaction: Introduction to Click Models - Eliz...OpenSource Connections
Relevance metrics like NDGC or ERR require graded judgements to evaluate query relevance performance. But what happens when we don't know what 'good' looks like ahead of time? This talk will look at using click modeling techniques to infer relevance judgements from user interaction logs.
2019 Haystack - How The New York Times Tackles Relevance - Jeremiah ViaOpenSource Connections
The New York Times has had search for a long time but 2018 was the year in which the company engaged with relevance in a deep way. The aim of this talk is to share what we've learned as we've increased our search sophistication and some of the challenges we still face.
Some of the techniques we've adopted in this past year include offline metrics testing, reflective testing, and user engagement metrics. We now have a process in place to quickly get mappings changes out to production. As a team we now also have a vocabulary for talking about relevance and can use it to discuss trade-offs and goals in conjunction with our metrics.
We hope this talk is of use to those who've put off working on search relevance due to fear, uncertainty, or ambivalence. We will talk about how we went from working on everything but search relevance to finally pulling back the curtain on the search system. We hope what we've learned can help others get started.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
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Agile2009 - How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project plan
1. How to sell a traditional client
on an Agile project plan
Arin Sime asime@o19s.com 434 996 5226
2. Outline
• Why do we need to sell it?
• Background/Bio
• Defining a “traditional” environment
• Survey on Selling Agile
• Strategies for persuasion
• The importance of continuing to sell
the process throughout the project
4. Why do we need to sell it?
“Some kind of structure
(or architecture) is
imperative because
decentralization
without structure is
chaos.”
- J.A. Zachman, 1987, “A framework
for information systems architecture”
6. More from Zachman...
“The architect must convince the owner
that the owner’s desires are understood
well enough so that the owner will pay
for the creative work to follow.”
We need to convince our clients that we
understand their desires, and that Agile can
substitute for most, if not all, of the up front documentation
7. A little about me...
Senior Consultant, OpenSource Connections
Custom software development consulting for
entrepreneurial, government, and military clients
Graduate student (M.S. in Management of I.T.) at the
University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce
Adjunct Instructor in a corporate software engineering
program for Virginia Commonwealth University
8. Some of our clients...
Platforms and Languages
ASP .Net C C# Java
Linux MySQL Oracle PHP
Python Ruby Solaris SQL Server
9. Survey on “Selling Agile”
Booz Allen Hamilton
SAIC
• Collected stories from a Capitol One
International Monetary Fund
survey of fellow students and US Air Force
other colleagues AutoZone
QinetiQ
US Department of Justice
• How they have sold Agile or Fannie Mae
been sold on Agile. Freddie Mac
AOL
IBM
ManTech
Department of Veterans
Affairs
University of Virginia
http://www.tinyurl.com/SellingAgileSurvey/
10. Survey on “Selling Agile”
“Agile seems to carry the connotation of 'c ode-
like-hell' or just, 'work faster'.”
“I am skeptical of any methods that that could
be interpreted as ‘cutting corners’”
http://www.tinyurl.com/SellingAgileSurvey/
11. What is a “traditional environment”?
“Plan Driven methods are
generally considered the traditional way
to develop software. Based on concepts
drawn from the mainline engineering
fields, these methods approach
development in a
requirements/design/
build paradigm with standard, well-
defined processes that organizations
improve continuously.”
12. Strategies for Persuasion
1. Trial by Sprint
2. Case Studies of Success
3. Client/Customer Testimonials
4. Finding a champion in Key Stakeholders
5. Using metrics of success
6. Showing how Agile combats common IT project failures
7. Examples of industry/government leaders using Agile
8. Comparison to other methodologies
9. Listen to their needs and address them
10. Sneak it in
11. Compromise
12. Agile Project Management Office
13. #1 Trial by Sprint
“You need to show a success to get adoption.”
14. #1 Trial by Sprint
“Trust me for two
weeks. If you hate
it, you can fire Dwight Gibbs, Senior Vice
me.”
President of Technology
for INPUT, formerly the
CTO at Legg Mason Capital
Management
Dwight Gibbs, CTO at Legg Mason Capital
Management, promising the Director of Research
that if he didn’t see development team
improvements after only one sprint, then they
would abandon Agile.
“The sprint went well and we stayed with Scrum”
15. #2 Case Studies in Success Proposal Tip
• Present case studies of Agile
success from your own client
history
• Example burndowns
• Stories of benefits to teams
• Highlight how the process caught
risks early, and addressed them
• Use graphics
• Present industry examples of Agile
success
Links to Agile Case Studies can be found at: http://www.notesfromatooluser.com/2008/11/scrum-case-studies.html
16. #3 Client Testimonials Proposal Tip
“Biggest gain from Scrum was
just keeping the project going.”
“certainly one of the
“Complexity
dictated we
most successful
couldn’t know it projects ever here”
all up front - we
have to “Eliminated biases of
prototype.” what developers can do
by letting them self-
“Got it done a lot better select”
because team is well
integrated. I didn’t have to
plan who worked on what.”
17. #3 Client Testimonials
“I don’t have to lord over people, no siddling over people with a
coffee cup like in Office Space.”
18. #4 Finding a Champion
“I highlighted the benefits to the Project
Manager: higher productivity and less team-
management stuff since the team will take
care of lots of team-management and updating
(burn charts) instead of PM's managing those
details.”
19. #4 Finding a Champion
• Identify Stakeholder most in need
• Address their needs with Agile
• Enlist their support in adoption
• Helps to already have a relationship
20. #5 Using Metrics of Success
“The development team applies Agile. I think it
is useful to obtain metrics and organize the
work. From a business perspective, I have not
seen the benefit.”
21. #5 Using Metrics of Success Proposal Tip
• Show metrics in proposals and
throughout your project.
• Show Burndowns over the course
of the project
• Use test coverage/test success as
a metric
• Velocity/Story points
accomplished by your team
• Defects from issue tracking tools
• Shown here is an excerpt from a
ThoughtWorks Project Manager's
Status Report
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,37380,00.html
22. #6 Show how Agile combats common IT failures
“I created a presentation [showing] increased
productivity, better risk management (through
early detection), lower defect rates and
enhanced team experience (which will translate
to higher retention, less conflict management
and more productive future projects).”
23. #6 Show how Agile combats common IT failures Proposal Tip
Top 10 Classic Mistakes
1. Poor estimation and scheduling
Poor estimation and scheduling
2. Ineffective stakeholder management
Ineffective stakeholder management
Classic Mistakes that can
3. Insufficient management
Insufficient riskrisk management
be mitigated by Agile, as
4. Insufficient planning identified in article
Classic Mistakes that can
5. Shortchanged quality assurance
Shortchanged quality assurance also arguably be mitigated
6. Weak personnel and/or team
Weak personnel and/or team issues issues by Agile and Scrum
(my addition)
7. Insufficient project sponsorship
Insufficient project sponsorship
8. Poor requirements determination
Poor requirements determination
9. Inattention to politics
10. Lack of user involvement
10. Lack of user involvement
Source: Prof. R. Ryan Nelson, University of Virginia. As published in MIS Quarterly Executive,
“IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices”, June 2007
24. #7 Examples of industry/government leaders using Agile
“Clients, especially the military, are wary of
catch phrases and sometimes unwilling to
change their habits.”
25. #7 Examples of industry/government leaders using Agile
Proposal Tip
• CIA IT Projects follow this spiral lifecycle:
• Understand the mission
• Establish the vision
• Develop the architecture Jill Singer
• Define plans Deputy Chief Information Officer
Central Intelligence Agency
• Resource plans former VP for Project
• Execute plans Management, SAIC
• Measure progress
• But within that lifecycle, they use Scrum,
primarily 4 week sprints
26. #7 Examples of industry/government leaders using Agile
• Benefits the CIA has seen with Scrum:
• Regular and tangible deliverables
• Customer buy-in
• Trying out prototypes
• Users enjoy being able to add features Deputy Chief Information Officer
Jill Singer
and change priorities with each iteration Central Intelligence Agency
• If a project is late, users don’t mind as former VP for Project
Management, SAIC
much
• Challenges the CIA has run into:
• “What is Version 1.0?”
27. #8 Comparison to other methodologies
“I gave an overview of the Scrum process and
highlighted the ease of transition since
iterative/incremental development has been in
practice for a long time (in other forms such as
a spiral approach)”
28. #8 Comparison to other methodologies Proposal Tip
From “Scrum in 5 Minutes”, by Softhouse. Available at: www.softhouse.se/Uploades/Scrum_eng_webb.pdf
29. #9 Listen to their needs and address them
“I am always skeptical of anything that
promises it is the 'o nly' or the
'best' [methodology].”
30. #9 Listen to their needs and address them
The Politics of Persuasion
1. Spend a lot of time listening. Ask
people what challenges they are
facing in their projects.
2. Make mental notes of each
challenge.
3. Turn those challenges around and
use them to segue into something
you wanted to talk about anyways.
(ie, how Agile will solve those
problems)
4. Customers appreciate that you are
offering positive solutions to their
problems instead of just pushing
your ideas without listening to
them first.
31. #10 Sneak it in
“Agile practices usually find their way into the
Soft ware Development Lifecycle even if they
are not officially blessed.”
“I make sure I utilize agile practices where ever
I can - I just don't use the agile terminology.”
32. #10 Sneak it in
• Implement it piece by piece, without
saying what you are doing.
• One idea: Start with iterations and
demos, daily stand ups. PM’s love those.
• Then move to developer driven practices
like sprint planning, XP, CI.
• Risky strategy? But can be used to
overcome fear of the word Agile
33. #11 Compromise
“The methodology that has worked in my
experience has been to incrementally introduce
Agile ... Start using a limited set of the
practices and gradually start bringing in
more.”
34. #11 Compromise
• Some clients will
require checkboxes of
all documentation they
always ask everyone
for. (I’m looking at you,
Federal Government)
• Try to shift when those
documents are due.
Focus only on those
that provide value up
front, leave the rest till
the end.
35. #12 Agile Project Management Office Proposal Tip
• Provide an interface to your
clients that translates your Agile
metrics into regular reports for
the client
• Takes compliance burden off your
development team
• Serves as “Educator and Coach”
to client
36. Never stop selling Agile.
When you’re in a project and it just saved
you (ie, due to increased agility to changes),
let the client know why.
When things are going bad, point out how
the increased visibility into the project at
least caught the problems earlier.
SELLING
AGILE
37. Thanks for your time - Any Questions?
Follow up....
www.OpenSourceConnections.com/Blog/
ASime@OpenSourceConnections.com
434 996 5226
www.Twitter.com/ArinSime