This document discusses creating lasting agile change in organizations. It explains that transitioning to agile requires more than just adopting new tools - it requires a cultural change where management shifts from control to enabling self-organizing teams. A successful transition involves piloting agile with a few teams, expanding to more teams over time using a transition team, and changing leadership styles from directive to coaching and supporting as team competence grows. Lasting change comes from empowering teams through self-organization rather than just implementing self-management processes.
How to form agile teams talks about the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Breakfast for agile champions workshop-sgsea2011Dave Sharrock
Breakfast - the most important meal of the day. Certainly, if you miss breakfast around mid-morning you can find yourself lacking the energy and motivation to keep on working; Missing out on a good breakfast can doom you to an ineffectual and frustrating day. The kick-off of a major transition has a similar impact on the success of the transition.
But how can we increase the chance of success on a large transition? What is a “good breakfast” when starting a large transition? What should be avoided? Drawing from our own experience of many successful transitions, and learning from the experiences of you, the audience, we will learn what works - and what does not work - when kicking-off large transitions
big bang delivery to continual value deliveryDave Sharrock
Recent years has seen an emerging new standard in software delivery, with Gartner claiming that over 80% of software development uses some form of agile methodology. Starting by understanding the mega-trends underlying this shift, from the commoditization of software changes, to the proliferation of development frameworks, to the increasing influence the customers of software have on the development lifecycle, we’ll consider the fundamental differences between a long big bang delivery lifecycle and a short incremental value delivery lifecycle, and its impact on information systems, security and controls.
How to form agile teams talks about the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Breakfast for agile champions workshop-sgsea2011Dave Sharrock
Breakfast - the most important meal of the day. Certainly, if you miss breakfast around mid-morning you can find yourself lacking the energy and motivation to keep on working; Missing out on a good breakfast can doom you to an ineffectual and frustrating day. The kick-off of a major transition has a similar impact on the success of the transition.
But how can we increase the chance of success on a large transition? What is a “good breakfast” when starting a large transition? What should be avoided? Drawing from our own experience of many successful transitions, and learning from the experiences of you, the audience, we will learn what works - and what does not work - when kicking-off large transitions
big bang delivery to continual value deliveryDave Sharrock
Recent years has seen an emerging new standard in software delivery, with Gartner claiming that over 80% of software development uses some form of agile methodology. Starting by understanding the mega-trends underlying this shift, from the commoditization of software changes, to the proliferation of development frameworks, to the increasing influence the customers of software have on the development lifecycle, we’ll consider the fundamental differences between a long big bang delivery lifecycle and a short incremental value delivery lifecycle, and its impact on information systems, security and controls.
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Agile teams form the building blocks for agility. Having strong agile teams allows an organization to overcome systemic issues and adapt the product development process to the needs of the business. Agile teams that are not self-organizing and continually learning can quickly become subsumed by the challenges around them. So what does it mean for a team to be agile? We look at the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Thoughts on Lean Product Development at CAMUG, YYC Nov 2014Dave Sharrock
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Product management as a discipline is undergoing a transition towards data-driven decision making. As the cost of testing product feature ideas falls, the role of a product manager becomes one based on testing many feature ideas, and rolling out proven features. In this presentation we touch on some of the trends behind this paradigm shift, and consider some tools the product manager can use.
Estimate Value to Deliver Value: Effectively Estimate the Value of Requiremen...Dave Sharrock
Agile organizations move work to dedicated teams, rather than move people to projects. In order to succeed, the Business Analyst needs to continually compare the value of different projects or work requirements to make sure that the teams are working on the most valuable items at any one time. But how can you compare new features that increase your profitability with platform migrations that increase your system stability or administrative features that reduce operational overhead? Where do BAs spend their time and how do stakeholders get their critical projects done?
The Experience Canvas provides a one-page requirement definition that allows stakeholders to effectively discuss and estimate the value of each requirement.
Using the Experience Canvas, we show how:
Stakeholders can compare and contrast the value of very different requirements with very different objectives,
Business Analysts can estimate return-on-investment using effort estimates from the team (investment) and value estimates from the stakeholders (return).
We often get asked why Scrum has only 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 3 ceremonies. In fact, our customers simply want to know why Scrum works. In these slides we try to explain the principles behind the prescriptions of Scrum, in the form of 5 Whys: Why Scrum? Why 3 Roles? Why 3 Artifacts? Why 3 Ceremonies? And Why agile engineering practices support Scrum?
Herding cats, or the art of scaling agile teamsDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
Leading Agile Change - AgileVancouver 2011Dave Sharrock
An often overlooked aspect of large agile transformations is how we lead that transformation. The elephant in the room, if you like, is that many coaches and transition consultants focus on helping teams become more agile, while not walking the walk themselves. It is extremely difficult to rely on many frameworks like Scrum or Kanban for managing the work of the transition team or leadership team in a large organization. We talk the talk with our teams, but don’t walk the walk.
Ever fought to replicate a successful pilot with a handful of teams to a functioning product delivery program across an enterprise? It's hard - and frameworks rarely make things simpler. In this talk, we'll examine the natural progression of an Agile transition, from isolated teams often held up as a pilot study, to synchronous agility where many teams collaborate to deliver a program, to the rarified world of networked agility, where we move back to the effectiveness of individual teams. While highlighting principles that distinguish each stage of growth, we also outline how to recognise where your transition is, and therefore where to move to next.
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an Agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
The Strategy Map visualizes management business plans by focusing on the four aspects of finances, customers, processes and development. The Strategy Map complements the concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and suits every business which concentrates on strategic management and plans future developments.
With the help of Strategy Map charts you can illustrate entrepreneurial goals which allow you to distribute projects and tasks in the best possible way so that plans can be efficiently implemented. Due to this strategic extension of BSC, you can create additional value and put business areas in a well-structured perspective with each other.
We all know the engineering practices we should be using, and many teams I meet say that they have plans to start unit testing or test automation, ‘in the next 6 months’. But for a variety of reasons familiar to all of us, like time pressure and ever increasing demands from the customer, these worthy plans rarely come to pass. Using experiences from starting agile teams, I’ll throw out some proven strategies for getting a toe hold in adopting great agile practices, as well as looking at real examples from the audience and how we might accelerate the adoption of good practices.
Giving Teams the Roots to Grow and Wings to FlyDave Sharrock
We introduce useful and proven practices that increase the sticking power of new agile teams, allowing them to stay agile long into the future. To create sustainable change, agile teams have to overcome organizational gravity that pulls them back into the old, comfortable ways of working. New agile teams are especially at risk of falling back after the coaches leave or the agile transition is declared ‘over’. By helping the team set expectations early, the +15 practices provide support just when the team is most vulnerable, and increases the chance of creating lasting change.
We introduce two concepts, the +15 Team and the +15 Flightplan, that support teams not just at the beginning of a transformation, when management attention and resources are focused on the effort, but much later on as the teams begin unlocking some of the more challenging engineering practices, such as continuous integration or continual refactoring which take time and repeated practice to achieve. You will learn how to work with a new team to apply these concepts, and how the team can use these to guide growth over time.
Successful Agile transformations are built on successful Agile teams; achieving sustainable success depends on helping those teams grow and evolve over time. But in order to be self-organized and self-directed, newly formed agile teams need an example to follow; they need to have a glimpse of where a team can get to after 3, 6 or 12 months of continual retrospection, learning and improvement. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are few examples of such success around them. In a large organization, the inertia of existing cultural norms is likely to weigh down on any visions of excellent execution, diluting the vision and ultimately limiting the success of the teams and the transition.
The +15 Team is a simple exercise to focus the team on developing good agile behaviors that provide the roots from which a team can grow. The +15 Flightplan is a workshop or game that delivers a long-term plan for agile maturity created by the team that allows the team to soar over time. Participants will be introduced to this technique as a way to better guide the team’s development over time as well as learn how and when to respond. Spending just minutes at every retrospective using these artifacts can make the difference between a team returning to old habits and performance levels or striding forward to become self-directed, high-performing agile teams.
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Agile teams form the building blocks for agility. Having strong agile teams allows an organization to overcome systemic issues and adapt the product development process to the needs of the business. Agile teams that are not self-organizing and continually learning can quickly become subsumed by the challenges around them. So what does it mean for a team to be agile? We look at the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Thoughts on Lean Product Development at CAMUG, YYC Nov 2014Dave Sharrock
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Product management as a discipline is undergoing a transition towards data-driven decision making. As the cost of testing product feature ideas falls, the role of a product manager becomes one based on testing many feature ideas, and rolling out proven features. In this presentation we touch on some of the trends behind this paradigm shift, and consider some tools the product manager can use.
Estimate Value to Deliver Value: Effectively Estimate the Value of Requiremen...Dave Sharrock
Agile organizations move work to dedicated teams, rather than move people to projects. In order to succeed, the Business Analyst needs to continually compare the value of different projects or work requirements to make sure that the teams are working on the most valuable items at any one time. But how can you compare new features that increase your profitability with platform migrations that increase your system stability or administrative features that reduce operational overhead? Where do BAs spend their time and how do stakeholders get their critical projects done?
The Experience Canvas provides a one-page requirement definition that allows stakeholders to effectively discuss and estimate the value of each requirement.
Using the Experience Canvas, we show how:
Stakeholders can compare and contrast the value of very different requirements with very different objectives,
Business Analysts can estimate return-on-investment using effort estimates from the team (investment) and value estimates from the stakeholders (return).
We often get asked why Scrum has only 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 3 ceremonies. In fact, our customers simply want to know why Scrum works. In these slides we try to explain the principles behind the prescriptions of Scrum, in the form of 5 Whys: Why Scrum? Why 3 Roles? Why 3 Artifacts? Why 3 Ceremonies? And Why agile engineering practices support Scrum?
Herding cats, or the art of scaling agile teamsDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
Leading Agile Change - AgileVancouver 2011Dave Sharrock
An often overlooked aspect of large agile transformations is how we lead that transformation. The elephant in the room, if you like, is that many coaches and transition consultants focus on helping teams become more agile, while not walking the walk themselves. It is extremely difficult to rely on many frameworks like Scrum or Kanban for managing the work of the transition team or leadership team in a large organization. We talk the talk with our teams, but don’t walk the walk.
Ever fought to replicate a successful pilot with a handful of teams to a functioning product delivery program across an enterprise? It's hard - and frameworks rarely make things simpler. In this talk, we'll examine the natural progression of an Agile transition, from isolated teams often held up as a pilot study, to synchronous agility where many teams collaborate to deliver a program, to the rarified world of networked agility, where we move back to the effectiveness of individual teams. While highlighting principles that distinguish each stage of growth, we also outline how to recognise where your transition is, and therefore where to move to next.
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an Agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
The Strategy Map visualizes management business plans by focusing on the four aspects of finances, customers, processes and development. The Strategy Map complements the concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and suits every business which concentrates on strategic management and plans future developments.
With the help of Strategy Map charts you can illustrate entrepreneurial goals which allow you to distribute projects and tasks in the best possible way so that plans can be efficiently implemented. Due to this strategic extension of BSC, you can create additional value and put business areas in a well-structured perspective with each other.
We all know the engineering practices we should be using, and many teams I meet say that they have plans to start unit testing or test automation, ‘in the next 6 months’. But for a variety of reasons familiar to all of us, like time pressure and ever increasing demands from the customer, these worthy plans rarely come to pass. Using experiences from starting agile teams, I’ll throw out some proven strategies for getting a toe hold in adopting great agile practices, as well as looking at real examples from the audience and how we might accelerate the adoption of good practices.
Giving Teams the Roots to Grow and Wings to FlyDave Sharrock
We introduce useful and proven practices that increase the sticking power of new agile teams, allowing them to stay agile long into the future. To create sustainable change, agile teams have to overcome organizational gravity that pulls them back into the old, comfortable ways of working. New agile teams are especially at risk of falling back after the coaches leave or the agile transition is declared ‘over’. By helping the team set expectations early, the +15 practices provide support just when the team is most vulnerable, and increases the chance of creating lasting change.
We introduce two concepts, the +15 Team and the +15 Flightplan, that support teams not just at the beginning of a transformation, when management attention and resources are focused on the effort, but much later on as the teams begin unlocking some of the more challenging engineering practices, such as continuous integration or continual refactoring which take time and repeated practice to achieve. You will learn how to work with a new team to apply these concepts, and how the team can use these to guide growth over time.
Successful Agile transformations are built on successful Agile teams; achieving sustainable success depends on helping those teams grow and evolve over time. But in order to be self-organized and self-directed, newly formed agile teams need an example to follow; they need to have a glimpse of where a team can get to after 3, 6 or 12 months of continual retrospection, learning and improvement. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are few examples of such success around them. In a large organization, the inertia of existing cultural norms is likely to weigh down on any visions of excellent execution, diluting the vision and ultimately limiting the success of the teams and the transition.
The +15 Team is a simple exercise to focus the team on developing good agile behaviors that provide the roots from which a team can grow. The +15 Flightplan is a workshop or game that delivers a long-term plan for agile maturity created by the team that allows the team to soar over time. Participants will be introduced to this technique as a way to better guide the team’s development over time as well as learn how and when to respond. Spending just minutes at every retrospective using these artifacts can make the difference between a team returning to old habits and performance levels or striding forward to become self-directed, high-performing agile teams.
Do you want to be an Agile Coach or to improve coaching skills? If yes, let's explore this PPT for the Agile Coaching Development Path.
This will help you in finding answer to the questions:
-What are the Foundation Skills for Agile Coaches?
-What are the different Agile Coaching Roles and Levels?
-What Foundation and Advanced Skills do I need to develop to -which Agile Coaching Role or Level?
-How my journey from developing Foundations Skills to Advanced Skills makes my level up from Agile Team Facilitator to Team Coach and finally enterprise coach?
Slides from today talk at the Digital World NRW, in Düsseldorf. The story of sipgate agile journey and the importance of aligning the culture to make sure the practices stick and evolve. Self-management is something which requires continuous attention, and leadership support.
How to grow your organization resilience and anti-fragilityAndrea Tomasini
Bringing agility to an organizational level requires a set of new skills and practices to emerge. While we have plenty of example on how agility can impact teams performance, by adopting well proven practices, there is still a lot of uncertainty in what to bring to an organizational level. Inspecting and adapting as an organization requires different structures and a more strategic approach, if we want to maximize the learning effect. Chaotic and uncontrolled experimentation and local adaptations can rapidly tear an organization apart. Focus on value and customers are important to set a common direction, but to roll out a shared strategy we need a solid and coherent cultural context, or the strategy will fail. Explicitly measuring and designing culture is a key enabler towards agility and can provide incredible advantages to an organization development. Understanding how to lead such change and enabling people to participate in creating rapid value, is the one thing that might save your company in the rough waters of today's market... Are you ready for the challenge?
Why self-organization might not work, and what has that to do with the compan...Andrea Tomasini
On the way toward becoming more agile, we often stumble on issues which are sometimes simple in hindsight, but when we are at it, they seem impossible challenges. We might start with an agile team, probably following the Scrum framework and having quite some fun while learning and delivering more value with our colleagues. At a certain point though the expected “hyper productivity” that some folks in the agile world are talking about doesn’t seem to be something achievable at all, and we comfortably think, that must be just marketing, or even the effect of the Chinese Whispers. But if we reflect ourselves on it, and have the courage to look deep and understand why things aren’t going the way they should, we often come to learn a lot. Question such as: “By the way, why do we still have Team Leader in a self-organizing team?” or “What is the role of a Tech Lead in a Scrum team?” up to “Why are we still estimating and planning upfront if we are doing agile development?” inevitably pop up. Is it a trust issue? is it a cultural problem? or is it an organizational design issue? Maybe the answer, as many times happen in complex situation is a mixture or neither of those.
Explore together with me what implications these dimensions have on the way teams will develop further or not develop. Also how do other companies around the world relate to this challenges, and maybe you can learn something from that…
Adopting Scrum: an enterprise transformation (Andrea Tomasini, agile42)Andrea Tomasini
Using Scrum as a Pattern Language for Enterprise Transformation
How Scrum Patterns can be used also to introduce Scrum itself into a company. After many years of experience and many attempts to systematically make Scrum introduction into medium and large Enterprises, agile42 shares with you tools and methods used in some of the most successful agile transition.
Companies of all sizes need to grow their own agile way of working, becoming more agile is a journey, not a destination, it is not about implementing a model or another…
It feels like someone presented scaling as the ultimate solution to solve every problem… and now everybody wants to buy it, it really feels like an old story. Way to often the focus about scaling agile lands on the delivery of projects, and explicitly on the operational model behind that. Every true Agilist would know that agility is about continuous improvement and excellence as much as it is about delivery of value. The real challenge lays in how to make an organization learn continuous improvement and embed it into its own culture.
Lander Associates, established in 1997, is an international training and performance development specialist to the professional recruitment sector and beyond.
The agile reading glasses: foundation principles and history being agile appr...Andrea Tomasini
A quick journey through the foundation of agile and the history behind it. Starting from the process control theory, moving forward through iterative and incremental approach, and the pull principle. Moving on to the continuous improvement focus, stemming from the Lean Thinking and the work done by the fore runners of the Toyota Production System (TPS). Finally discussing how agile thinking can help establishing self-organization and focus on customer value, motivating both the workers and the clients, by establishing healthier short-feedback cycle, with collaboration focused on learning faster together.
Is Agile in your DNA | Portland Global Scrum Gathering 2023Dave Sharrock
Agile has been around for a while. The Agile Manifesto was penned in 2001. By 2010 CIO Magazine had Agile identified as one of the top 3 trends any technology-minded leader should be actively incorporating into their organizations. And today, Agile is so well entrenched that it feels like we have always been Agile.
Now for the hard part. Agile is a mindset. A philosophy on how to approach product delivery. The practices and frameworks will fade in and out of the spotlight, but, as Marty Cagan has said, the core Lean and Agile principles are, hopefully, here to stay. But this is the riskiest part of the journey. We think we have this agility thing in our DNA and can start looking to the future. This is the moment that John Kotter described as institutionalizing change.
We will discuss how to understand where you are on your agile journey. Is agility in your DNA, or still an outlier in how you get work done? How can we visualize what agility looks like in our organization? How can we understand what remains to be done to lock in the agile mindset?
Specifically, we will look at five dimensions across your organization, and evaluate how strongly agility is in the DNA of your organization. From this perspective, we can identify opportunities to strengthen the change and where to move on, confident in the knowledge of a job well done. Come and learn how to peel back the covers on your organizational agility.
Product Owners plant the seeds for excellent agile delivery teams. Great POs know how to plant the best seeds, seeds that the team can swarm around and deliver quickly, that provide rapid feedback and learning, and that morph towards excellent customer experiences. In some situations we need a good PO, in others we need a great PO. The trick is to know the difference. Join me on a journey of discovery working with contemporary examples to find out how to be a great PO or a good PO, and why you might, at different times, want to be both.
We look at two key dimensions that determine whether you need good PO or a great PO, and how to tell the difference. First, what problem is the PO trying to solve? Are you rolling out changes to a mature product or battling to enter an emerging field? Are you scaling rapidly or slowly? Second, how is the PO making decisions about their backlog. Give a PO a project requirements document and a timeline, and what’s a PO to do? Even the best and most experienced POs will struggle to deliver an exciting customer experience that captures the heart of the customer.
Through the workshop, you will learn a simple model for identifying great POs based not on PO experience, but on how the PO makes decisions about their backlog. The best POs know how to combine data and stakeholder input to best effect.Finally, we consider the product problems you are trying to solve, the pace of change, and how this affects the PO - good to great - you want for your product.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
Epic budgeting is all about meeting deadlines. Working with agile teams that pull work while meeting stakeholder expectations around what gets done by what date. The challenge is that teams don't always pull as much as we want them too. So how do you hit a deadline without forcing work onto the team?
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is clearly more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic Budgeting allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Why stop at your IT department? Or an Agile approach to Change Management
Business agility is more than the organization’s IT shop adopting an agile delivery method. Business agility depends on three core capabilities: rapid delivery, strategic sensing, and customer rapport. As such it builds resilience to change as a strategic imperative and eventually it allows businesses to build a strategic advantage in driving change.
Investments in “agile” from an IT perspective will not increase business agility. So what does a company need in order to successfully drive change rather than react to it?
We’ll talk about how creating a resilient organization starts with rapid delivery and why many major organizations are turning their attention to less costly on-demand releases. We’ll look at how customer rapport is the new driver of operational efficiency, where not building something is invariably cheaper than optimizing the operational cost of building anything at all.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Epic Budgeting - how agile teams meet deadinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Team Member to Mgr: “Now I’m in a self-organized team, what do you do exactly?” Mgr: “Um, good question. Come to the talk and find out.”
Learning Objectives:
* Be able to answer the question “What do you do as a manager of an Agile team?”
* Understand the difference between line management, functional management and program management.
* Learn how to influence behavior through visible progress and expectations management rather than telling teams what to do.
* Discover why a focus on flow and value delivery is critical to Agile leadership.
* Bring Dilbert cartoons into your management style without everyone calling you “the pointy haired boss.”
IBM Innovate2014 - Is Agile Compliance an Oxymoron? Dave Sharrock
Agile software development is a light framework that focusses more on early value delivery and incremental improvement than traditional tasks like detailed up-front planning, comprehensive specifications and technical documentation. But from the perspective of regulatory compliance, this planning and documentation serve a purpose. How can we reconcile agile approaches that value a working product over documentation with the need to meet regulatory requirements for, e.g. medical devices or telecommunications? I will discuss how to bring together the apparently conflicting needs of regulatory compliance and agile, and show by example how agile teams actually approach tough regulatory requirements in finance, healthcare and telecommunications.
Learning Objectives
- How to use agile in a highly-regulated environment
- How to incorporate strict regulatory requirements within an agile development approach
- The power of agile as a risk-limiting software development approach
Herding cats or flocking birds - agile portfolio managementDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, once the teams have established a predictable velocity, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, whether by timeframe or feature set. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, with the risk that the coordination cost becomes higher and efficiency falls. In this talk, we consider some ground rules for visualizing work across multiple teams and discuss how dependencies are coordinated across different teams and product lines.
The Good Shepherd - the Role of BAs in AgileDave Sharrock
Agile teams may be popping up everywhere, with ScrumMasters and Product Owners and Development Teams. But what role does the BA play? Should the BA join the team, working with the development team to deliver work requests? Or should the BA take on the role of Product Owner, working with the business to define the work requests and ranking them to maximize value delivery? Is the BA best suited to the ScrumMaster, guiding the team to predictable delivery? Or is there some other role we've not talked about? The answer, of course, is 'it depends'. We will discuss the different roles on an agile team, and investigate how the traditional responsibilities of a BA role fit within the agile context. What we want to understand is how the BA fits into the agile development process, considering how the agile team works, and how the responsibilities of the BA are addressed in an agile environment.
Agile methods are based on short iterations delivering functionality in increments, with small, well-defined work requests consisting of just enough requirements definition at just the right time. But with such a short-term focus, how can agile teams manage a product portfolio over months or even years? We'll talk about the building blocks of an effective agile portfolio management strategy, starting with the core tools of the Product Owner, and extending these to look beyond the next few weeks of work into planning and tracking a product release or portfolio over several months.
The +15FLIGHTPLAN agile team behaviors, used to support and guide agile teams in developing a growth plan for long-term sustainable agility. Presented at Agile2012, in Dallas, Texas.
Many agile teams start off well. But once the initial energy has dropped, and the team has gained some experience, what’s next? What do great agile teams do that good or failing agile teams don’t? You will learn how great agile teams develop the skills to continually improve, moving from good teams to high-performing teams that work ‘in the zone’. You will also develop a ‘flight plan’ for your agile team, creating the environment to stay in the sweet spot of high performance.
Adaptive software development processes epitomized by Agile methodologies are based on continual improvement – incremental changes that emerge as teams iterate and learn about the product they are developing. This appears to conflict with the world of the program office, responsible for defining the software development lifecycle (SDLC), in which a stable and repeatable development process with well-defined ownership and controls is a common objective. Using recent examples in which agile methods have been successfully introduced into large organizations with existing SDLCs, we consider the difficulties of creating a verifiable process when the process itself is continually being modified, and look at how software development can be managed and controlled without stifling the benefits of adaptive software development processes.