Agile adoption tales from the coalface

Many people equate Lean and agile or claim that one is a subset of the other. In fact, they have almost opposite emphases: thinking versus doing; teams versus individuals; planning versus reacting; and many more. This talk will help you clarify the distinction in a way that will help you focus soberly on how to improve your environment, team, product and process, by going beyond the buzzwords to the fundamental building blocks.

The early agile literature was adamant about two things: stick with small teams and put everyone in one room. However, in the years since the Agile Manifesto, the increasing popularity of agile and the dramatic improvements it brings has pushed it onto larger and larger projects. Additionally, having an entire team--especially on a large project--in one room, or even one building is a luxury no longer enjoyed by many projects. In this presentation, we will look at how agile can be scaled to work on any multi-team project. Even a project with two teams will benefit from learning how to proactively manage interteam dependencies, conduct iteration planning for multiple teams, cultivate communities of practice, and coordinating work. Because so many projects are spread across multiple sites we will also look at overcoming the unique challenges facing distributed teams. We will look at deciding how to distribute a team, how to create coherence among team members, the importance of getting together and when are the most important times to use the travel budget, changes to what the team documents, and how to handle meetings when spread across timezones. Whether your project is spread across two locations in the same city or spread around the globe, you will leave with practical advice to try tomorrow.

After an introduction to the basic tenets of Agile and some Agile practices, this presentation to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) talks about ways to convince your organization or clients to use Agile software development practices. Based on a presentation given at Agile 2009 by Arin Sime, Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections.

Mike Cohn gave a presentation on leading self-organizing teams at the Norwegian Developer's Conference. He discussed what self-organizing teams are and how they operate as complex adaptive systems. Cohn explained that managers can subtly influence self-organizing teams without direct control through containers, differences among team members, and transforming exchanges between members. He provided examples of how to apply this model to influence how a team evolves over time, such as selecting the team's environment, defining performance metrics, and energizing the team with a clear goal.

This document discusses the importance of daily work management. It states that without proper daily management, things will deteriorate over time. It outlines three levels of workers - level 1 focuses on retention and maintenance, level 2 on continuous improvement, and level 3 on breakthroughs. The document then discusses concepts like total quality management, 5S, standardization, exactness, simplification, and visual management that are important aspects of daily work management. It emphasizes the need for 100% employee involvement and elimination of variances to achieve continual improvement.

This document provides an overview of Agile software development. It begins by defining Agile as a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation. It then discusses some common Agile practices like Scrum and eXtreme Programming. The Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. Finally, it provides advice for different roles on how Agile can benefit them and their work.

The document discusses whether organizations need to change and considers applying Kanban principles. It outlines some Kanban concepts like limiting work in progress, continuous flow, and continuous improvement. It acknowledges that change may not always be needed but suggests using Kanban when issues like long lead times, quality problems, or unpredictable demand exist. Kanban is presented as a potential solution for organizations not suited for Scrum or with chaotic requirements. The document advocates trying Kanban principles before concluding that change is not possible.

The document discusses managing a Thanksgiving dinner project on short notice. It uses this analogy to explain how to effectively manage a statement of work for an inherited project with tight deadlines and expectations. It emphasizes understanding stakeholder needs, defining requirements and deliverables, assessing and mitigating risks, and setting success criteria to guide the project to a successful completion.

Most projects start out as great ideas. But, somewhere along the way, project management mistakes are made, communication breaks down, and, most projects—70% of them— end up late, over budget, and on the way to the project dumpster. These 8 projects failed epically, but therein are contained project management lessons any smart manager can benefit from.

This document discusses digital service continuity and IT service continuity management. It begins with definitions of key terms like disaster, critical events, and recovery time/point objectives. It then covers various support models for handling incidents from normal to major. Emergency planning processes and the role of IT service continuity across the service lifecycle are also examined. The document outlines different recovery options and discusses challenges of the cloud. It emphasizes the importance of automation and adequate tools to meet recovery time objectives.

Generic presentation about scalability challenges. First London Scalability Meetup. Quick overview of the DataSift architecture.

Some categories of tech debt, their causes, potential metrics (and how to avoid their misuse), and ways to pay down the debt, and avoid the accrual of technical debt. Talk first given at Agile Development Practices East 2011.

Session: Software Testing Career Skill Development Event: BugDay Bangkok 2009 Venue: Sripatum University Date: December 19th, 2009

Presentation I gave to the Chicago ACM about Lean Software Development. Full audio can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/griffinc/intro-to-lean-software

General introduction to agile practices like Scrum and Kanban. Also covers what situations Agile is best at, what situations Agile doesn't help with, and what an Agile team should look like. This deck is a general intro to Agile for OpenSource Connections clients.

The document provides an introduction to agile methodologies and Scrum, outlining key concepts like iterative development, self-organizing teams, and delivering working software frequently. It also describes Scrum practices such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and retrospectives. The goal of the document is to educate people about agile and Scrum principles and processes through presentations and exercises.

The document discusses descaling organizations to be more agile. It advocates for descaling by moving away from centralized functional teams and long-term planning towards autonomous product/feature teams that own the entire process. This allows organizations to adapt quickly, improve resilience, and scale in a sustainable way. The key aspects of descaling discussed are leadership, product development, testing, operations, design, infrastructure, finance, and workplace.

This document summarizes an agile leadership assessment of an individual. The assessment scored the individual a 0 out of 100 in several key areas of agile leadership, including setting clear expectations, goal setting, coaching employees, involvement in development, and attitude. All scores were 0%, indicating the individual needs to improve in all areas assessed by developing agile leadership skills. No strengths were identified. The assessment suggests the individual needs to work on and improve all leadership skills measured.

This document discusses Peace Through Prosperity's approach to working with marginalized and underprivileged groups to improve their prosperity. It outlines Peace Through Prosperity's open source approach and materials. It also details the steps being taken for Peace Through Prosperity's first pilot project outside of Pakistan in Andhra Pradesh, India, including translating materials into Telugu, establishing project goals and metrics, and selecting street-based trades to target. The document encourages people to get involved and work together to transform the world.

This presentation was given to a client at the start of an assessment phase to explain to the staff why Agile is of value and briefly explain how it works. We also explained the typical approach to transition and what would happen during the assessment. The presentation was given to Engineering and related groups. This was prepared and delivered jointly with Gerry Kirk. Please email us if you would like a download.

Technical Paper Competition - PMI's Project Management Regional Conference, Pune - 28 Feb, 2015 More details about Technical Paper Competition: http://www.pmi.org.in/events/regconf2015#papers

The document discusses adopting an Agile methodology to improve processes. It identifies areas to focus on like adhering to Scrum practices, allocating resources efficiently, and conducting sprint retrospectives. It also notes things to improve like meeting release dates and tracking resource time. Scrum roles and norms are defined to establish transparency and focus only on the current sprint. The Scrum process is outlined including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to continuously improve.

This document outlines the requirements for obtaining the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) certification. Candidates must have at least 2000 hours of general project experience and 1500 hours of agile project experience within specified timeframes. Some applications are randomly selected for an audit, where candidates must provide documents verifying their experience and training. The exam contains 120 total questions, with 100 scored questions and 20 unscored, to be completed in 3 hours. Certification is valid for 3 years and candidates must earn 30 professional development units to maintain it.

The document discusses selecting pilot projects for an agile transformation. It recommends that pilot projects should demonstrate business value, convince leadership to support the transformation, and create positive momentum. An ideal pilot project has a clear business benefit, can be delivered within 3-6 months by a single team, and has an available sponsor. A selection framework considers both the benefits an agile approach could provide and an organization's readiness to adapt. Assessing these factors helps identify suitable early adopter projects and potential roadblocks. A selection matrix can then highlight the best candidate projects to start with.

This presentation talks about importance of changing mindset by different stakeholders involved in Agile, for the expected outcome to be delivered by Agile adoption. It talks about various scenarios or apprehensions many people from different roles would have in Agile adoption and inputs on handling this change management exercise effectively.

The document describes the current project lifecycle and organization at Smartbank, which follows a traditional waterfall SDLC methodology. This approach is not well-suited for agile software development. The CIO wants to improve agility, quality, and responsiveness. Key changes recommended include adopting agile methods like Scrum, reorganizing into cross-functional teams, and establishing roles like a VP of Program Management to oversee delivery. Challenges to transitioning include training, adoption of practices like test-driven development, and potential resistance to change.

This document provides guidance on conducting effective retrospective meetings (retros). It emphasizes that retros are important for continuous improvement and should not be taken lightly. It outlines steps for effective retros such as gathering both qualitative and quantitative feedback. It also provides tips for facilitating vibrant discussion, ensuring action items are captured, and involving the entire team including those in different locations. The overall goal is to make retros an engaging process that drives positive change.

Trying to define a comprehensive CMMI like Agile Maturity Model? If you're running all Scrum meetings but cannot deliver every sprint, you're not agile at all, if you don't follow any Scrum format but you're delivering small features every couple of weeks you're still Agile - deliver the highest value in the shortest time. User Story Cycle Time - one universal Agile maturity measurement you might be able to use in your Organization cross different teams.

Deliver on time and improve communication with the business to minimize project failure. Your Challenge The Agile evangelists are having trouble converting others to the Agile philosophy. Your team is facing pressure to deliver projects in a smaller time frame. The Waterfall approach is causing projects to go over budget, misunderstanding of project owners’ expectations, and late delivery to the end-customer. Projects that get implemented successfully may be susceptible to problems as the software gets older and crucial changes are too expensive. A consolidation roadmap that is based on an easy-to-implement method will ease the burden on resource and infrastructure maintenance. Our Advice Critical Insight Agile is not suitable for all organizations, or all projects. Carefully select pilot projects that have the greatest chance of success and determine the right requirements or risk significant cost overruns to fix problems or roll back development. An Agile rollout may require peripheral projects to be accelerated. Agile will modify internal roles and processes. Get ready for change management. Impact and Result Agile will improve communication and transparency between teams and stakeholders, which will lead to higher quality products and fluid team dynamics. The success of the Agile pilot should be used to build the case for an organizational-wide deployment. In order for your organization to stay competitive, it must place focus on delivering projects at a quicker pace with the right features.

This presentation covers details on how we can measure that Agile Transformation is providing the intended outcome or not. I presents a research & survey which tries to understand how different people measure value of Agile Transformation

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that offers opportunities for organisations to hire precisely those ICT services they need (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS). Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit a lot from software services that are managed in a professional way. Cloud computing enables them to overcome restrictions from low budgets and limited resources for ICT. However, cloud adoption is challenging and requires a clear cloud roadmap. Organisations lack knowledge of cloud computing and are usually challenged by the adoption of cloud services. In most cases, SMEs do not know what aspects they have to take into consideration for a sound decision in favour or against the cloud. A cloud readiness assessment is a general approach to facilitate this decision-making process. The presented study focuses on the development of an assessment framework for cloud services (SaaS) in the domain of enterprise content management (ECM) and social software (ecollaboration).

Short descriptions of levels for the Lean-Agile Coach Self-Assessment: http://www.slideshare.net/LucaMinudel/leanagile-coach-selfassessment

The goal of any enterprise agile adoption strategy is NOT to adopt agile. Companies adopt agile to achieve better business outcomes. Large organizations have no time for dogma and one-size-fits-all thinking when it comes to introducing agile practices. These companies need pragmatic guidance for safely and incrementally introducing structure, principles, and ultimately practices that will result in greater long term, sustainable business results. This talk will introduce a framework for safely, pragmatically, and incrementally introducing agile to help you achieve your business goals.

These slides quickly illustrate how you can successfully adopt Agile to improve your development efforts. In addition to discussing how and why teams are interested in Agile, it covers some of the challenges of adopting it and suggestions for ensuring success.

Lightning talk at the Agile Meetup. Discusses the idea that if you are introducing change you need to understand how the organisation got the way it is now, and address the underlying concerns and drivers, so as to make the chanegs stick.

This document summarizes an upcoming workshop on Agile Planning, Inspection & Adaption. It will include sections on approaches and value of agile, agile planning, inspecting progress, and adapting processes. The workshop will be led by two experienced agile coaches and include a Q&A session. Attendees will learn how to plan iteratively, inspect progress through metrics and retrospectives, and adapt processes to improve.

The document discusses the challenges of traditional project management and introduces an agile approach called project inception. It outlines the goals of project inception, which are to define the project goal, create an initial project plan, and assess feasibility. It also discusses establishing product vision, customer needs, and technical goals during inception. The document provides guidance on splitting projects into problem and solution domains, creating a product backlog, and planning releases and iterations using an agile approach to help projects get started in a more effective manner.

This document outlines 21 patterns of mature agile teams. Some key patterns include: having an emergent architecture that evolves with each sprint; achieving different levels of "done-ness" for work, stories, and releases; practicing aggressive refactoring; investing in continuous integration; and ensuring organizational leadership is aligned with agile principles. The document provides examples and discussion topics for each pattern to help teams assess their own maturity and identify areas for improvement.

From the presentation given at Web Innovation 2008 by Bhavin Turakhia and Naresh Jain on adoption of Agile practices at Directi.

On October 14, 2015, Michael Gill gave a presentation entitled "The Process of Communication, A Practical Guide for Project Managers." Communication is not about knowing the process. Communication is about managing the process. A successful project manager communicates effectively by setting and managing expectations throughout the lifecycle of a project and, by doing so, creates redundancy in a fluid industry. The importance of a simple and redundant communication framework cannot be overstated. Referencing my book, The Process of Communication, I will focus on the role of pre-production and the importance of Requirements Gathering, establishing a teams Level of Effort, communicating Assumptions and through the development of these tools establishing a realistic Timeline. I will speak about how all of these deliverables are used to manage clients expectations as obstacles arise and requirements change.

Expectations from IT Team Project Methodology - Why it is as important as the Technology for your Product Gaps in Recent Graduates How to bridge these gaps?

This is a presentation that was given to the Project Management Institute of Metrolina. The goal is exposure to the fundamental ideas of Lean/Agile/Scrum software development.