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Friday, November 13, 2015 - 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Summit Keynote
SMT4

Leading with a Data-Driven Approach

All too often, we leaders are held accountable for making business critical decisions with limited options and based mostly on gut feelings rather than actual data. Over the past ten years as we moved from waterfall to Scrum to kanban (and in some cases back to Scrum again), we have uncovered a consistent thread in our decision-making—we were in that same gut-feeling boat. Recognizing that instinct simply wasn’t good enough, we decided that a data-driven approach was not only necessary but essential to creating a culture of success. Today, the teams at Ultimate have boiled down the standard visualizations and charts into simple, tile-based scorecards. Join Prateek Singh and Mike Longin to learn how these cards allow Ultimate to quickly assess at a glance the health of the team and the products they are developing. Explore the common challenges faced by an enterprise-sized adoption of agile and how Ultimate has used data to confront these challenges head-on including how our major ceremonies have been adapted to bring data into our decision-making process.

Mike Longin
Mike Longin, Ultimate Software

Mike Longin is a certified ScrumMaster, agile coach, and manager of software engineering at Ultimate Software. For more than ten years, Mike has helped pioneer agile implementations of Scrum, kanban, and Scrumban for the Ultimate’s enterprise needs. As part of these efforts, he has led a metrics-first approach to agile leadership, letting the data lead the team—not the other way around. Mike has developed web automation tools that combine agile principles with automation needs, culminating as co-lead on the Simple Web Automation Toolkit project.

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Prateek Singh
Prateek Singh, Ultimate Software

Prateek Singh has been leading and working on agile teams for the past ten years. Starting with XP, then Scrum, and now kanban, Prateek has gained a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding agile techniques, practices, and implementation principles. At Ultimate Software, he conducts training and coaching for teams regarding kanban and lean principles. In his career, Prateek has played the role of software engineer, ScrumMaster, and manager of software engineering.

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