Project Management

Tutorials

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

TE Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery 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 project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.

TI Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices

David Hussman, DevJam

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns on their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides you through the rest of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.

Keynotes

K1 The Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles

Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 8:30am

Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

Concurrent Sessions

BW7 Visualization to Improve Value Delivery

Michael Harris, David Consulting Group

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

Small organizations usually lack the time and money to make mistakes in what they work on next, so prioritizing by business value is a survival skill. In large organizations, work is organized into projects to which resources are assigned to maximize their utilization. Lean product development flow theory suggests that this strategy of assigning resources to projects and optimizing their utilization is a poorer—and sometimes catastrophic—strategy for delivering economic value. Instead, the flow of work through small teams of expert resources is preferred. Mike Harris gives an overview of the key elements of flow theory and shares five simple but essential metrics—value visualization—for defining and tracking business value. These metrics optimize the flow of economic value and bring economic value metrics into tactical decision making in the software development process. Mike explains how these metrics require more involvement from the business and represent more accountability for the business and IT.

BT10 Use Design Thinking to Deliver Innovative Products and Services

Garren DiPasquale, Aduro

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

Often a project is kicked off with a solution in mind that only serves the business or technology. Additionally, requirements ambiguity leads to products and services that the business didn't ask for, the tech team struggles to deliver, and users don't want. So, how do you move away from poor requirements and work together to build innovative solutions that bring the business technology and design together? Garren DiPasquale explores the history of design thinking principles and methodologies. He explains how to use this information to define requirements and objectives to create a common understanding of what makes your product or service a success. Garren shows not only why we must get the business, technology, and design on the same page, but also how to leverage the process tools from the designers toolbox to implement multi-disciplined product teams, solve problems creatively, and collaborate to produce software that is viable, feasible, and desirable.