Product Owner Challenges and Traps

Time: Wednesday, May 19   10:00-11:30
Speaker: Roman Pichler

Product owners have a challenging job: They have to hold up the product vision, groom the product backlog, plan the release, work closely with the team, stay in touch with the customers and users, and align the stakeholders. Establishing this new role is no less demanding, as it does not fit easily into existing structures. Product owners take on some product marketing responsibilities, many product management and some project management duties. So it is no surprise that some individuals and organisations struggle to apply the product owner role effectively.

Objectives

• Discuss common product owner challenges and traps including distant, partial, and proxy product owners, and wish list and ice age product backlogs.
• Help you understand which mistakes you should try to avoid as a product owner and how to overcome the challenges when you face them.

Starting up Great Agile Teams

Time: Wednesday, May 19   11:45-12:45
Speaker: Lyssa Adkins

Starting up an Agile team is one of the first things you might be asked to do when a company wants to “go Agile” or wants to expand right NOW.   What do you need to know before starting up a team? In the start-up, how much do teams need to know about Agile before they “go”? Each other? What the project is all about? Who they will become as a team? These and other questions are answered as we walk through (and practice) one good way to start-up Agile teams.

In this session, participants will learn:

• what they need to know about the new team and the organization before starting up teams
• what team members need to know about the process, themselves, their team identity and the work ahead before they start
• how much “Agile 101″ to train
• what components make for a good team start-up
• what activities are effective for getting the team off to a running start; to deepen the team member’s learning and help them get the spirit of Agile

The Dolt’s Guide to Self-Organization

Time: Wednesday, May 19   14:00-15:00
Speaker: Jurgen Appelo

Self-organization lies at the heart of Agile. Yet, few people really understand what it means, and perhaps even fewer people know what is needed to make self-organization actually work.

Objectives

• What self-organization is from a scientific viewpoint
• What the important choices are when delegating work to a self-organizing team
• How to manage all stakeholders to make sure that they work with and not against the self-organizing system

Overcoming Several Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

Time: Wednesday, May 19   15:15-16:15
Speaker: Johanna Rothman

If you’ve been trying to change your organization so that your projects are more agile, you may have noticed several problems: it’s difficult to have people such as product management, senior management, even functional managers work and manage in a way that makes sense for your agile project; you’re working with other parts of a large program that isn’t agile; you have a geographically distributed team; your management wants to know at the beginning when the project will end; or even that the project team does not share a common vision of what “done” means.
You are not alone. Johanna Rothman explores common process, team, project, and individual team member issues, such as your stand-up meetings are sit-down-and-forever meetings, your managers still think multitasking is a good idea, no one person can decide what business value means, or you have unranked requirements. Learn to make the changes needed for agile more palatable and help people work with you in a way that helps your projects proceed.

Objectives

• Differentiate the kinds of pitfalls
• See where your influence can change things
• Examine at least one strategy for each pitfall
• See where your agile implementation might be falling short

The Purpose of Leadership and Governance

Time: Thursday, May 20   10:00-11:30
Speaker: Jurgen Appelo

Agile software development regularly refers to self-organization, but leaves out the important topics of leadership and governance. Those are often the responsibilities of people standing outside of a Scrum team (development management, project management). This session explains how to treat a self-organizing team which is embedded in a larger organization (with two or more Scrum teams).

Objectives

• How to define goals for teams and whathe different types of goals are.
• How to define boundaries to the authority of team members.
• What there’s still to do for managers when a self-organizing system works.

Collaborative Agile Contracts

Time: Thursday, May 20   11:45-12:45
Speaker: Lars Thorup

Most customers expect to buy software by time-and-material or by fixed-price-fixed-scope contracts based on detailed requirements. In this presentation, we will report on our experiments with commercial contracts that supports an agile development process, based on concrete examples of collaborative contract types.

Objectives

• How do you sell an agile project?

Experiences with Agile in Large Enterprises

Time: Thursday, May 20   14:00-15:00
Speaker: Jason Tanner

As more organizations achieve success with Agile practices, larger enterprises continue to attempt Agile transformations in various contexts. This discussion oriented session will explore different transformation experiences with large enterprises and the common factors that determine success, failure or mediocrity.

Similar to smaller companies, large enterprises strive for efficiencies in the delivery of products and services to customers. As many organizations have successfully tried and adopted Agile with remarkable results, large enterprises have also started Agile journeys. The benefits of higher productivity, increased quality, faster time to market and closer customer relationships clearly justify the investment in learning and applying Agile practices. The group will discuss the patterns of adoption followed by most large enterprises. Then the group will explore the most significant obstacles commonly encountered in the cultures of large enterprises hindering faster adoption. The group will then explore a roadmap for enterprise adoption and a short plan to starting a pilot project within in a large enterprise.

Objectives

• Understand common patterns of enterprise adoption, obstacles to adoption, a roadmap for adoption and a short timeline for starting a pilot project.

Boosting Your Organizational Transformation

Time: Thursday, May 20   15:15-16:15
Speaker: Anders Sixtensson

Interest in Agile is growing! More and more sw-intensive development organizations have ambitions to “Be Agile”. The initiative tends often to be driven bottom-up, with teams being the first to honour the Agile principles, adopting Scrum and XP practices. While this organic growth may suffice at a local level, when it comes to large-scale Agile transformations and/or organizational transformations the stakes are raised. A coordinated agile approach is called for and we believe we have an answer.

Based on Softhouse experiences, we have created a concept called Agile Change Centre, refining and improving it in a number of Change projects. We’d like to share the concept and spread the news. What is the Agile Change Centre? It is a temporary organization whose objective is to facilitate and speed up a sustainable change in daily behavior. Focus is on behavior, not just a new set of process documents. A blend of time-boxed changes, roll-out teams, a transition backlog, management team removing impediments like policies are some of the choice ingredients, together with education, coaching and 1st and 2nd level support for the deployment of this new behavior.

Objectives

• How to set up an Agile Change Centre, the guiding principles and some examples and experiences from our change projects.