CIO / Director

Tutorials

MA Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 8:30am

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning. In hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

ME Twelve Heuristics for Solving Tough Problems—Faster and Better

Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 8:30am

As infants, we begin our lives as problem solving machines, learning to navigate a strange and complex world in which others communicate in ways we don’t understand. Initially, we hone our problem solving talents; then many of us find our explorations thwarted and eventually stop using and then begin losing our natural problem solving ability. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Psychologists tell us that people can regain lost skills and learn new ones to become better problem solvers. Payson Hall shares techniques and skills that apply to situations in real life.

MG What’s Your Leadership IQ?

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

MO Understanding and Managing Change

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 1:00pm

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it fails. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. It may be that your great idea didn't mesh well with your organization’s culture or a host of other reasons. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work well within your organization.

MP Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®

Bob Hartman, Agile For All

Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 1:00pm

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Bob Hartman and Michael Vizdos shares their experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together.

MQ Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 1:00pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

TD Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 11/12/2013 - 8:30am

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could.

TI Eight Steps to Kanban

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Tue, 11/12/2013 - 8:30am

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution 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.

TQ Patterns for Collaboration: Toward Whole-Team Quality SOLD OUT

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Matt Barcomb, odbox

Tue, 11/12/2013 - 1:00pm

A lot of talk goes on in agile about how collaboration among team members helps drive a shared responsibility for quality—and more. However, most teams don't do much more than just hold stand-up meetings and have programmers and testers sit together. Although these practices improve communications, they are not collaboration! Most teams simply don't understand how to collaborate. Janet Gregory and Matt Barcomb guide you through hands-on activities that illustrate collaboration patterns for programmers and testers, working together.

Concurrent Sessions

AW1 The Mindset of Managing Uncertainty: The Key to Agile Success

Ahmed Sidky, SCG Inc.

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 10:15am

The speed of global change and the advancement of technology will continue to increase the uncertainty in our work. Those with an Agile Mindset can manage uncertainty through continuous value-based discovery; those with a Fixed Mindset try to “freeze” things early to decrease uncertainty. Unfortunately, many people never switch their mindset and are doing agile while not being agile. Ahmed Sidky explains that your mindset is at the heart of your day-to-day challenges as you try to manage uncertainty more effectively.

AW6 Six Impossible Things before Breakfast

Dan North, Dan North & Associates, Ltd.

Kyle Thomson, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 2:15pm

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of things that just don’t happen in real life. A managing director at Bank of America abandons decades of organizational “best practices” and recreates his organization by letting people organize their own teams. And, if that weren’t unusual enough, the teams even choose their own coach. Impossible. A group of former managers reinvent their role as servants rather than masters. Also impossible.

AW10 I Thought YOU Were Flying the Plane: Preventing Projects from Falling Out of the Sky

Steve Adolph, WSA Consulting

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 3:45pm

One of the most cherished concepts of the Agile Manifesto is valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Within this idea is the implicit assumption that individuals innately know how to interact. Dramatic lessons from aviation suggest otherwise. During the mid-1960s the frequent crashes of perfectly good aircraft alarmed the world’s airlines. Investigators discovered nothing lacking in the pilot’s “stick and rudder” skills; these accidents were the result of the flight crew’s inability to work as a team.

AW11 Organizing a Self-Organizing Team

John Lynch, Clashmore Software Solutions

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 3:45pm

Your organization is embracing agile. When it comes to adopting the process, your team seems to be doing all the right things. Yet deep down, something still doesn’t seem quite right. As their leader, it could be that you haven’t figured it out either. Perhaps your team is lacking some spark and is reluctant to take on real ownership. What can you do to help the team organize themselves to become the high-performing software development group you know they can be?

AT1 Large Agile Transformations: A Roadmap for Lasting Change

Ole Jepsen, goAgile

Jenni Jepsen, goAgile

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 10:15am

Agile methods have gained the attention of leaders as a way to speed time to market and increase motivation. Businesses are looking to agile as a way to achieve organizational change so teams deliver more value faster, and where people’s pride and joy of work are enhanced. However, we know from extensive experience that agile practices by themselves will not lead to this kind of an organizational transformation. What does it take?

AT2 Implementing DevOps and Making It Stick

Alex Papadimoulis , Inedo

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 10:15am

If you’ve ever been involved in promoting cultural change within an organization, you may have experienced something even more disheartening than flat-out rejection—a full rollback of hard-won cultural change followed by a decade-long resentment of anyone remotely associated with the implementation. This has happened at countless organizations with agile, with SOA, with virtualization—and it’s starting to happen with DevOps. How can such a simple idea that’s been so successful at so many organizations become such a resounding failure at others?

AT3 Using Non-Violent Communication Skills for Managing Team Conflict

Pat Arcady, FreeStanding Agility

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 10:15am

“Going agile” has transformed thousands of workplaces into groups of self-directed teams, more engaged and increasingly more productive. Knowledge workers report increased job satisfaction, strong team identity, and camaraderie. One of the secrets of high performing teams is their ability to manage conflict in ways that support team cohesion, deepen trust, and reinforce commitment to team greatness. Agile practices value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Sounds great on paper! How do you live that?

AT5 Transforming to Enterprise Agility: A Leadership Practicum

Phillip Cave , SolutionsIQ

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 2:15pm

The pace of innovation, often hastened by agile software development, has begun to pull entire organizations into the desire and need for more agility. Phillip Cave shares his experiences transforming organizational behavior at the department and enterprise level. He describes the data, tools, approaches, and practices he has used to help leaders and organizations reach higher levels of agility. Going further, Phillip explores the leadership skills needed at all levels of the organization to achieve lasting change.

AT9 Lessons from Busting Organizational Silos

Tricia Broderick, Santeon Group

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 3:45pm

We’ve all heard of the evils that can result from organizational silos—bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and the “us vs. them” mentality. Perhaps you’ve been a victim. As Tricia Broderick repeatedly experienced value from busting individual project team silos, she naturally wanted to expand her busting across the entire organization. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be anything but simple. What surprised her was how many challenges resulted from falling victim to both faulty logic and prior successes, including halting a team’s progress out of concerns of sub-optimization.