Agile Development

Do you work in an organization that spends too much time budgeting, road mapping, and planning their project roadmap or portfolio? Do you ever feel like all this effort is pointless and wasteful? Do you think perhaps there might be a simpler, more pragmatic way? If so, this session is for you. After a brief overview of necessary strategic and budgetary inputs to an investment-like product portfolio, Matt Barcomb and David Hussman share practical ideas for generating and validating projects as Real Options.

Until your code is in production, making money for your business, or otherwise doing what it was built to do, you are merely building toy castles in a technological sandbox. Continuous delivery gets more business value into production as soon as possible, validates business decisions, and responds rapidly to customer feedback. Steve Povilaitis demonstrates what continuous delivery is all about and why automation is your only option for rapidly and reliably building, testing, and deploying software.

Stories in the backlog must be ready to go in time to begin each sprint—priorities are set, stories are at the Goldilocks level of granularity (not too big, and not too small), and stakeholders are prepared to discuss the details. Getting the backlog ready and grooming it take serious consideration and work. You need to plan, budget for, and track this work. Andy Berner describes five key issues to consider in that planning.

When an organization is looking to adopt a new process, one of the biggest questions is whether they should use a pre-defined process or adopt a more empirical approach, allowing the new process to emerge. This is especially true in agile, as organizations look at methodologies and frameworks such as SAFe, Scrum, Crystal, Kanban, and others. Even in the face of “inspect and adapt,” many organizations struggle to understand how to adopt an empirical view of their process without simply falling into chaos and old habits.

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who successfully foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo.

Small companies that have been highly successful delivering software often struggle as they grow larger and their software needs to grow with them. They must learn to manage multiple technology platforms and multiple releases while dealing with the associated roadmaps and support plans. A small company experiencing phenomenal growth, Apex Capital has built four major platforms with two more coming online in 2014. Apex needed a way to consistently deliver software across each platform and communicate that to the respective user communities.

It is widely understood that agile mitigates project execution risks. However, auditors and regulators unfamiliar with the agile process often reject it as non-compliant. In regulated industries, organizations seeking to adopt agile are often challenged to provide evidence that prescribed processes are being followed and can be evaluated to ensure adherence. This issue is compounded when auditors expect a more traditional, artifact-driven process, which, in an agile environment, does not necessarily mitigate the risks for which they were designed.

Agile has delivered impressive performance improvements at the project level, and some attempts to scale agile’s success to the IT project portfolio have also demonstrated good results. However, agile is not for all IT projects nor all project teams. Sometimes other approaches may be more appropriate. Can disparate approaches co-exist harmoniously in the same project portfolio? Can portfolio managers apply a flexible, “best-tool-for-the-job” approach, while simultaneously driving portfolio-wide adoption of disciplined, hyperproductive techniques?