Project Management

Adopting agile development methods in a conservative environment can be a daunting and time-consuming venture, facing resistance at all levels of the organization. You may wonder: Will this organization ever get with the times? Will our leaders ever change their way of thinking? Brian Duncan shares personal experiences and lessons learned in bringing an agile development mindset to two distinct organizations—a bottom-line product-driven software development organization, and the conservative, risk-averse Space Department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Sharing the Good (what worked well), the Bad (what set us back), and the Ugly (what we had to abandon), Brian shows how to bring a slow-to-change organization into the forward-thinking agile methods of today. He presents practical approaches (adoption committees, grassroots techniques) and creative endeavors (free classes, an innovation lab) along with their impact on the organization. With persistence and a multifaceted approach, even risk-averse organizations can adopt agile.

Agile at scale continues to be a hot topic as more large organizations begin their transformation. Many frameworks are available, including SAFe, DAD, LeSS, Enterprise Scrum, and Nexus. Scaling agile across the enterprise is very challenging; even understanding the options is complex. How can you pick one? Do you need to pick just one? Or pick at all? The right answer depends on your unique situation. Smart scaling with the Agile Scaling Knowledgebase (ASK) 2.0 provides a way to compare different approaches, going beyond the more “popular” frameworks to include new, emerging ones. Steve Spearman and Richard Dolman explore the evolution of popular approaches and discuss how you can make the best decision to fit your company and your project. Join the conversation, share your experiences, and learn from others. Get to know ASK as a valuable tool to help you and your organization explore the topic of agile scaling within the context of your organization’s specific needs.

Aristotle once stated, “Well begun is half done.” However, many agile initiatives suffer from a feeble launch. So how can we increase the likelihood of success for a team or organization? By developing a sound team charter. Beginning with the end in mind, we use retrospective techniques to develop consensus around objectives, vision, and mission. Linda Cook and Chris Espy introduce the components of a good charter and explain how those components help focus the team toward a common goal. In addition, the development of the recommended charter components ensures that key questions are succinctly answered during the kickoff of a team’s efforts. Linda describes when to create or revise a charter and the associated artifacts and process that provide a framework for the team charter. Learn the various types of charters and their recommended content. During the workshop activity, teams will develop a complete charter for a team of their choice or for a provided case study.

We teach managers to foster agility by encouraging their teams to self-organize, stop assigning work, and telling them how to do it. Since the Product Owner defines the what and the team defines the how, what’s left for managers to do? Managers need to become servant leaders. It’s a key success factor for agile transformations. However, most managers have no idea what servant leadership is or what these leaders do. David Grabel teaches the true meaning of servant leadership—transforming it from a buzzword to a guiding principle. Learn how, as a leader, you can accelerate your team’s agile journey. Working in groups, participants discuss the challenges faced by an agile manager. As part of your learning, create artwork using Legos, clay, and pictures to illustrate how a servant leader meets the challenges of today. David defines the new job description for today’s managers in tomorrow’s agile culture. Come and prepare to take your part in it.

Substantial evidence exists that coaching plays an important role in helping an organization successfully transform to agile. External coaches can help an organization as it begins to adopt agile practices, but a sustainable, long-term agile adoption requires the organization to stand on its own. Developing an internal coaching team is an important step toward becoming self-sufficient. Join Sue Johnston and Shawn Button as they explore the process of building a team of competent internal coaches. Discuss how to identify coach candidates, put together and run a coach development program, and create opportunities for learning on-the-job. Talk about potential bumps in the road—those organizational impediments to building coaches—and strategies for overcoming those barriers. Sue and Shawn share their experiences with what works and what doesn’t. Leave with a realistic plan to discover and develop coaches within your organization.

Project Management Professional (PMP) or other detailed training has become almost ubiquitous in the project management profession. Through this training, Brian Watson says that many of us have learned what we should be doing when it comes to managing projects, and this often conflicts with what we are doing. This gets more complicated when transitioning from plan-based methodologies to an agile framework. What may seem like chaos is really the perfect time to stop managing projects through controls that lack trust in the development teams, dust off those skills of empowerment, and embrace those activities we should be doing. Project managers are leaders, and agile transformations are the perfect time to eliminate ineffective, micromanagement processes and to implement collaborative, empowering techniques. Brian shares his experiences combining corporate agile transformations with mentoring project managers on how to leverage agile techniques. Learn how to effectively embrace resource management, estimating, reporting, traceability, and courage—all while project managing in an agile world.