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Dennis Stevens

LeadingAgile, LLC

LeadingAgile cofounder and vice president of delivery, Dennis Stevens is passionate about how leadership, organizational design, governance, and enabling technologies can increase organizations’ ability to create value for their customers. Dennis spends most of his time contributing to LeadingAgile’s approach and supporting delivery to their clients. He was on the steering committee that created the PMI-ACP certification. Dennis is a fellow of the Lean Systems Society, has been published in the Harvard Business Review, and was awarded the Naval Commendation Medal by the Marine Corps during Desert Storm. Dennis originally attended college on a violin scholarship—and played rugby.

Speaker Presentations
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 3:00pm
Improving the Team
Aligning Teams, Architecture, and Governance

Many enterprises are trying to create a more predictable flow, achieve ROI faster, improve quality, and be more responsive to the market. To this end, they attempt to transform to team-based agile, and then leverage scaled agile models to govern how requirements are defined, decomposed, coordinated, and tested. However, many of these efforts prove ineffective, and organizations fail to realize hoped for business benefits. In complex organizations, interdependencies between team design, architectural design, and governance contribute to this problem. Often misaligned because each is “owned” by a different part of the organization, their overall effectiveness is limited. Dennis Stevens shares an approach for creating a common view of the organization’s offerings. He shows how to use this view to align team design, architecture design, and the governance model with the strategy of the organization. Finally, Dennis shows how to leverage this aligned model to maximize the benefit to the business.