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Steve Adolph

Blue Agility

As an agile coach with Blue Agility, and co-founder of e-learning publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and development of leading edge network management systems, railway signaling, and telecom billing. Steve has diverse experience in job roles ranging from developer to chief engineer to CTO and coauthored the popular book, Patterns for Effective Use Cases.

Speaker Presentations
Monday, November 10, 2014 - 1:00pm
Half-day Tutorials
The Role of the Agile Business Analyst

The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders. BAs can leverage traditional tools such as use cases to Generate Flow and feed user stories to fast moving agile teams. However, large backlogs of stories are wasteful, so lean principles are applied to Lean Out the Flow. Finally BAs may need to Bridge the Flow between more traditional elements of the organization and its agile teams. Whether you are a BA new to agile or struggling to find the right fit in your team, join this highly interactive session to “get your flow” going.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am
Agile Readiness
Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption

“Can we do agile?” is a question often asked by individuals enviously looking at the impressive results reported by other organizations that adopted agile practices. What they are usually concerned about are the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture and tools; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Yet, despite these perceived barriers, many organizations with these challenges do agile. Others wonder why, after all their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile. What they’re not seeing are the real barriers to agile adoption—the social barriers that impede fast decision cycles. Steve Adolph introduces a fast decision cycle model, explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, and provides a configuration guide to help participants identify and evaluate these social impediments. Using a case study of a “high ceremony” organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve impediments to doing agile.