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| Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development |
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Join Jean Tabaka for an exploration of collaboration and facilitation for project managers. In this exercise-packed session, learn an approach for more effective decision-making. Jean leads you in evaluating and contrasting collaborative versus command-and-control leadership styles. See and experience collaborative decision-making and the vital facilitation techniques to plan for and run highly productive meetings and group interactions. Practice collaborative planning sessions, daily interactions, and review meetings. Working in small teams, each participant facilitates at least one of the class exercises. More than learning to plan collaborative meetings, you will practice helping teams gather insights and make decisions—without taking over the decisions yourself! Be prepared to think on your feet, be challenged, and grow your personal collaboration and facilitation skills.
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| Learn more about Jean Tabaka |
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Schedules and deadlines all too often are dictated to software development teams. When this happens, what can a manager do? Michael Mah and Anny Randel address estimation and risk management—the key issues in deadline-driven projects. Employing industry data from more than 7,000 completed projects worldwide, Michael and Anny describe how different software projects—agile development, waterfall development, and package implementations—behave in unique and interesting ways when a deadline is imposed. Using case studies from leading companies, Michael and Anny illustrate how to estimate and commit to a reasonable project scope in the face of aggressive deadlines. Find out how to “triage” the amount of functionality you can deliver within an imposed deadline and deal methodically with the inevitable project trade-offs. Develop a core set of estimation metrics that will help you avoid common scheduling traps.
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| Learn more about Michael Mah |
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Laptop Required |
Participants need to bring a laptop computer with Windows XP or Vista to this session. Administrator rights for installing software and USB port or CD ROM reader are also recommended. |
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| Linda Rising, Independent Consultant |
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Those who attend conferences or read books and articles discover new ideas they want to bring into their organizations—but they often struggle when trying to implement those changes. Unfortunately, those introducing change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change and what forces in your organization drive or block change. In addition to using these approaches to change your organization, you can use them to become a more effective person. Come and discuss your organizational and personal change challenges. Linda shows how the lessons from her book, Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, can help you succeed. Learn how to overcome adversity to change and to celebrate your improvement successes along with your organization’s newfound practices.
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| Learn more about Linda Rising |
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| Jim Highsmith, Information Architects, Inc |
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Agile project management and development practices have expanded into organizations worldwide at an astonishing rate. Some companies have gone beyond thinking of agile as a software development method to viewing agility as an organizational imperative. Jim Highsmith explores topics that will help your organization—whether at the team, department, or enterprise level—think of agile in this new and vital way. Effective agile integration focuses on six key areas in which agile concepts and practices must be integrated into the enterprise—organization, process, culture, governance, alignment, and performance. Learn how to create a path for your organization that enhances its ability to deliver successful agile projects. Discover powerful ways to help your organization fully embrace the agile ethic. Learn how to overcome issues like project governance, performance measurement, release planning, and scaling up and out that can prevent you from becoming a successful agile organization. Through interactive discussions and Q&A sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from others and share your knowledge and experiences with agile projects and practices.
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Learn more about Jim Highsmith
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| Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. |
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If you’ve been managing projects for a while, you may not understand how an agile project works or your role in it. If you’re accustomed to predicting the schedule, you may be puzzled by how to use empirical data to know the project’s progress. If you are used to assigning the work, you may struggle with having people self-assign work and your new role as coach and facilitator. Without a Gantt chart, you may be perplexed and not know how to answer your management’s question, “When will you be done?” Agile projects provide the project manager—and any other manager—more useful information than a serial-lifecycle project. Yet, it’s difficult for many project managers to make the transition to agile because they don’t know what they can or should do. In this experiential tutorial, Johanna Rothman uses a small problem to practice working on an agile project. Practice collecting the data—both quantitative and qualitative—that tells you how the project and the team are progressing. Learn how to assess the project’s true state and be able to tell management when you will be done.
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| Learn more about Johanna Rothman |
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| Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova |
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In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments with incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores ways that the best leaders create safety nets that allow people to take risks to discover and try new possibilities, fail early, and correct faster. Learn how to remove fear and engender trust to make your team and organization more creative and productive. They will spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo and more energy creating and innovating. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to create open environments based on trust and to take the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn how to do the right thing without breaking trust and find out when and how to acknowledge and reward trust within your team and organization.
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| Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton |
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| Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting |
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Saying the right thing at the right time can be difficult. Many of us find ourselves wishing we had some magic phrases that would make difficult conversations easier and more productive. Michele Sliger helps you build a toolkit full of the right phrases, the perfect questions, and the best ways to start, guide, and end discussions. Whether you’re a manager, an engineer, or a tester, you can benefit from learning new and more open ways to exchange ideas—after all, to get better software we must have better communication. Join Michele for this interactive session, where you’ll have an opportunity to try these phrases in simulations with your colleagues in an environment that’s safe for learning and experimentation. Find out how to stop a pontificator, keep meetings on track, disagree without shutting down the discussion, deliver feedback, say “no” politely but firmly, and encourage further dialog. Discover how to pack your discussion toolkit with what you need to keep conversations going in the right direction.
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| Learn more about Michele Sliger |
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| Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants |
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Risks are endemic in every phase of every project. One key to project success is to identify, understand, and manage these risks effectively. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality. It is here that the effective tester can significantly influence the project outcome. Shortened time scales, particularly in the latter stages of projects, are a frustration with which most of us are familiar. Julie Gardiner explains how risk-based testing can shape the quality of the delivered product in spite of such time constraints. Join Julie as she reveals how you can apply product risk management to a variety of organizational, technology, project, and skills challenges. Through interactive exercises, gain practical advice on how to apply risk management techniques throughout the testing lifecycle—from planning through execution and reporting. Take back a practical process and the tools you need to apply risk analysis to testing in your organization.
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| Dan North, ThoughtWorks |
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Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a new approach in the evolution of agile software delivery. With its roots in test-driven development, domain-driven design, and automated acceptance testing, BDD focuses on the ways an application is expected to work—its behavior. By constantly reflecting on the varied points of view of different stakeholders, BDD helps ensure that product owners and the development team are in-sync on what is really needed and what to work on next. In this highly interactive session, Dan North introduces the principles behind BDD and describes how it works in practice. He provides an overview of the methodology of BDD—understanding your domain and who your stakeholders are, identifying and exploring requirements, automating acceptance criteria, and delivering working and tested software. Dan then looks at the nature of change and describes how to implement BDD in different contexts, including applying it to an in-flight project, managing distributed or large-scale development, and working with legacy systems. Dan encourages both experienced and novice agile managers and practitioners to join this session and bring with them their current challenges—and war stories.
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| Learn more about Dan North |
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| Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova |
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There’s no doubt about it—agile has gone mainstream. Short delivery iterations give organizations the means to incorporate change safely, reach go/no-go decisions early, and discover realistic team velocities. Managers can better determine if market windows can be reached—thus placing successful products in customers’ hands. What if the ground beneath the project team is changing rapidly even as it is trying to make progress? Pollyanna Pixton shares a collaboration model and iterative delivery process to help you succeed, even in unstable conditions. She shares her ideas on creating an open environment, identifying the talent the team needs, managing risks, and creating team ownership to ensure great results. Among the skills you need are a collaborative, transparent leadership style, an approach to positively influence outcomes, and collaborative communication. From there, you need to know when to stand back and let things happen. Leave this session with some keys to successfully lead agile project teams—even in the midst of chaos.
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| Learn more Pollyanna Pixton |
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| Robert Galen, Independent Consultant |
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For many, an important attraction of plan-driven software development is the (illusion of) control provided by big up-front planning. Detailed plans give managers and developers the misguided belief that it is possible at the project’s onset to successfully define the features, delivery date, budget, and quality. For many, this approach has never provided the expected benefits of accurate budgeting and a detailed roadmap to high-value software. Such plans often gather dust on the shelf or become the basis for contention between management and the development team. Join Kenny Rubin to discover how agile estimating and planning are different and can actually work as expected. Learn about the multiple levels of planning that occur on agile projects and how the planning and estimating effort is performed in a “just-in-time” manner throughout a project. Leave with experience in agile planning as you try new approaches to estimating including story points and ideal time. Practice estimating with the popular Planning Poker technique and explore other approaches that can dramatically increase your project’s chances of on-time completion.
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| Learn more about Robert Galen |
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| Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant |
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You’ve identified what your system should do as a set of use cases or agile user stories. Now, the developers have questions about the look and feel of the user interface. How can you quickly, predictably, and with confidence move from a high level understanding of what a system should do to a useful user interface design? Jeff Patton introduces a practical approach for translating user goals and tasks into user interface designs that users will love. Discover how a user-centered design practitioner moves quickly from user tasks to user interface. Practice taking a set of user stories and transforming them into more tangible actions that users might take in the user interface. Then, collaboratively build and test paper prototypes of your proposed user interface. In addition to paper prototyping skills and basic usability testing skills, learn the essential visual design skills that can help improve the appeal of your new user interface.
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| Learn more about Jeff Patton |
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