WEBINAR – Role of Management in Lean-Agile Transformations (8/25)
August 25 — 12-1 pm PDT
Management has long seemed to be the forgotten aspect of Lean-Agile organizations. Many in the agile community even talk about protecting their teams from management. This session discusses how management is an essential aspect of any lean-agile transition that involves more than just a couple of teams. While the business side of the organization must select the proper product enhancements to work on and the teams must actually do the work, management’s role is just as critical. It must provide the organizational structure that allows for the flow of ideas to be manifested as value to the customers. Lean-thinking provides new opportunities for managers to lead, coach and support their teams in order to accomplish this.
* Managers as leaders, coaches and agents of organizational change
* Why managers are essential to lean-agile transformations
* How Lean-Thinking enables managers to improve the organization
Crossing the Chasm with Geoffrey Moore (mp3)
Hear from Geoffrey Moore himself about “Crossing the Chasm”, one of the Top 100 business books ever published. This audio will give you an excellent thorough discussion on Moore’s book.
If you are a Product Manager, Product Owner, Business person, someone who wantsto understand how the market adopts and accepts products – then this is a must listen audio.
Forrester reported this week that Agile is going Mainstream
Forrester acknowledged that Agile is going mainstream and most certainly crossing the proverbial business chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about in his book “Crossing the Chasm“. Crossing the Chasm is not easy, but Forrester’s survey’s have revealed that Agile is starting to cross over !!! Moore divides organizations into 5 groups as shown in Figure below. (read more at “Holistic Agility needed for Scaling“)
Holistic Agility needed for Scaling
If you want to scale Agile to the enterprise, then lets take a look at a few great points that Forrester presented from their Q2-2010 survey results this week that verified the need to scale Agile beyond a single team.
You’ve heard in many of my webinars that adoption of agile methods is not always smooth and many organizations are experiencing obstacles to their acceptance.
There is great news to share.
Agile is going Mainstream
It was interesting to see Forrester acknowledge that Agile is going mainstream and most certainly crossing the proverbial business chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about in his book “Crossing the Chasm“. Moore divides organizations into 5 groups as shown in Figure below.
WEBINAR – Acceptance Test Driven Development (7/16)
July 16, 2010 — 12-1pm PDT
This session is about how proper use of acceptance testing can avoid many problems instead of merely finding them at the end. It redefines the role of QA to one of avoiding errors and improving our system of development. Acceptance test-driven development is the process of having customers, developers and testers all talk about the requirements before any coding is done. By answering the question “how will I know I’ve done that” for each requirement, prior to it being developed, both a greater understanding of the requirement can be achieved and a better process to implement that requirement can be attained.
* Why answering questions about requirements will never get you the answers you need
* How creating test specifications increases developers understanding of requirements
* Why writing tests first speed you up in the short term while saving time in the long run.
PDU: 1
COST: Free
Speaker: Alan Shalloway from Net Objectives - who’s approach of Business Driven Software Development has a proven track record with medium to large organizations. They cohesively engage business and development sides of an organization to ensure product enhancements are properly selected, sized, prioritized and then implemented. Management is also engaged as they provide the proper organizational structure for development to take place. They believe that when it comes to developing software, there is no one-size-fits all.
** Primary audience: Developers and Testers. (Also useful for: Team Leads)
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WEBINAR – Necessary Conditions for Enterprise Agile Success: The subtle stuff you’re probably getting wrong (7/21)
Thursday, July 21, 2010 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
Agility and leanness are goals almost every organization around the globe are reaching for today. Agile success stories and ROI statistics propel executives to insist upon a new way of managing IT and developing software. However, this commitment is often made without a sufficient understanding of the broad reach of agile implementations nor the cultural change necessary to experience true success. In this 90-minute presentation, Certified Scrum Practitioner Katie Playfair will examine where narrow applications of agile can go wrong and how to make sure your agile and Scrum transition gets the kind of results your organization is expecting.
COST: Free
WEBINAR – Transitioning To Agility (Step 3): Implementing Agile with Kanban
Agile methods provide two distinct approaches. 
Now that we’ve learned that we want to achieve quick delivery and that we must attend to delays, how do we accomplish this? The more popular method, Scrum, often requires an abrupt change to an organization’s structure. While effective when one can do this, it is often difficult to achieve on a corporate wide scale. The second, Kanban, takes a different approach to managing transitions. It suggests starting where you are, attending to work load limits and gradually improving productivity by removing the delays in your value stream.
This webinar presents how to start your agile transformation by understanding where you are and using Kanban to gradually improve your value stream at a pace your organization can handle. Read more
Transitioning to Agility (webinar series)
To manifest agility at the enterprise level, one must learn the many reasons for achieving it, understand their challenges, find solutions, as well as implement Agile. This webinar series with Alan Shalloway from NetObjectives will discuss all three areas in three (3) steps.
(Step 1) Understanding the Business Reasons for Agility
To manifest agility at the enterprise level, one must learn the many reasons for achieving it. This webinar presents several business reasons for ability:
- Speed to market translates to greater revenues
- Quicker understanding of customer needs
- Eliminating Waste
- Better project management
- Faster learning
- Better technical quality
Think you are Agile? ….how do you know?
I was recently involved in an organization that wanted to transition their software development teams to Agile since 2 of the teams had been doing 2-week iterations for over 6 months. The problem was, that despite the manager yelling that they “were already Agile”, they were not delivering valuable and potentially shippable increments frequently nor consistently (iteration after iteration), nor were they adapting to changing priorities and customer needs along the way.
The essence of Agile is not whether or not a team is doing TDD or pairing or automated regression testing, (although I strongly believe they are all good practices and I evangelize them to all my clients). Being Agile means delivering business value frequently and consistently while adapting to changing business needs. No matter what practices are being followed, if you are not doing this then your not Agile. That’s where assesments come in…
WEBINAR – Essential Skills for the Agile Developers
Many developers have been suddenly thrown into developing code in stages whereas they used to be able to do bigger designs up front. Many people tell them to do test-driven development and emergent design while ignoring the fact that their work with legacy systems may prevent such actions. In any event, new methods require new skills. At first it may appear that this skill set is huge and daunting. Fortunately, it isn’t. One of the things we’ve learned at Net Objectives is that there are often a few simple things one can do that makes a huge difference. We like to have people start there. We refer to these as trim tabs since they are small things that make a big difference. This seminar introduces some trim tabs for the new agile developer.
* How programming by intention results in strong cohesion and loose coupling
* Why you must consider how you will test your code before writing it
* Using encapsulation as a design technique
Retrospectives – Make Good Teams Great !
Project retrospectives do more than just help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. They help improve productivity, quality, team trust and more. Where as traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems” or “lessons learned”) are only performed at the end of the project — too late to help.
This 50 min video discusses how organizations using iterative, incremental methods, Agile retrospectives are used to stimulate continuous improvement throughout a project.
TOPICS INCLUDE:
- The retrospective cycle
- Where it fits in the Agile process
- What are the 5 parts to a retrospective
- Where will it get you?
- How to support change
My Speaking Engagements …..
-June 2: WEBINAR - Becoming Agile -June 15: PMI California Inland Empire -Sep 9: So Calif Quality Assurance Assoc Let’s Connect!
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