It
has been quite a week. My Agile 2008 presentations are finally complete
and I am ready for Toronto. This is my first time speaking at the
conference and I'm pretty excited about it. This is also my first time
attending the conference on the vendor side. All in all this will shake
out to be a great week, I am sure of it.
I keep telling my wife
that while yes, the conference is going to be fun, I am not going to
Toronto for vacation. I'll plan to keep the pictures of the VersionOne
boat cruise to myself.
Before I head out, I want to give
everyone a little more information on my talks, how they came to be,
and what you can expect to get out of them. A few months ago I
published my abstracts, but now that the talks are actually written, it
is time for a little bit of an update. Every one of my talks at Agile
2008 started right here as blog posts and are based on my personal
experiences running agile (and not so agile) project teams.
If you are heading to the conference, please come and introduce yourself. I would love to meet you guys!
Leading Volunteers with Agility
August 6th, 2:00PM - 3:30PM, Huron Room
This is a topic I am very passionate about.
I
am involved in lots of different volunteer communities, anything from
APLN and DSDM, to the small private school my wife and I help run. As I
became immersed in thinking and teaching agile, I began to see
significant parallels between running great software teams and running
great volunteer organizations. Any time you need to engage someone's
heart and mind, their passion and creativity, or their enthusiasm and
excitement, the principles and the techniques are the same.
This
is a workshop so fortunately I don't get to do all the talking. We are
going to build on the ideas in my original blog and see where we can
take it. We will engage the audience to help explore the problem space
a little more deeply, brainstorm some ideas for agile principles that
can be applied to volunteer situations, and then see if we can come up
with some practical guidance to share with other people trying to lead
great learning organizations.
http://blog.versionone.net/blog/2008/02/leading-volunte.html
The Good and Bad of Agile Offshore Development
August 7th, 4:00PM - 5:30PM, Conference Room H
Back
at CheckFree I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to work
with a great team of folks at Infosys in Pune. It is one thing to hear
about the pros and cons of off-shoring, but getting to experience some
it first hand was invaluable. This is my opportunity to share some of
those experiences, and the lessons learned, with the broader agile
community.
This talk is an experience report so I only have 30
minutes to get my most important points across. This talk does comes
with a six page experience report, so if you are interested, look me up
in the conference proceedings. I'll post the report to my blog (and the
VersionOne site) after the conference has concluded.
http://blog.versionone.net/blog/2008/05/taking-agile-of.html
Using the Unified Process as a Scaling Framework for Scrum
August 8th, 8:30AM - 10:00AM, Conference Room C
This
one is the most controversial of my three talks. Prior to joining
VersionOne, I was managing a portfolio of projects supported by a team
over 70 people. That team was responsible for several products, each
with significant architectural subcomponents, some of which were
external to the company, and which collectively spanned a wide range of
new and legacy technologies.
We found out pretty quickly that
some of the principles being taught in the agile community just didn't
seem to resonate when you got bigger than seven people or so. When the
skillsets required to deliver became significantly diverse, and the
number of people required to build the system get really big, what do
you do? We could not find the answers.
Our company happened to
be going through a RUP deployment and I had some background using RUP
from a previous job. We basically took some guidance from the RUP and
used it to scale Scrum.
We used the RUP phases to control risk
and prioritize the backlog. Phases also helped us establish more agile
tollgates with the business. We took some guidance on use cases and
architectural decomposition and we took the 'spirit of RUP'. We learned
that doing agile at scale sometimes means you have to be more
intentional about architecture, sometimes you need to write more things
down to keep everyone on the same page, and we created models for
helping everyone, across all the teams, work in effective
synchronization.
I start my talk saying that this is not a
'questioning agile talk' it is a 'scaling agile talk'. To some degree
this is really a 90 minute experience report on how we scaled agile. Is
this the final word on the subject? Probably not. There are others in
the community writing in this space. I will be interested to see if
this approach gains any traction.
Be warned, the community did
not like this talk. I think I got six reviews and all of them were bad.
The conference selected me anyway. I am hoping those six people are not
lying in wait ready to throw rotten vegetables at me! I am not a RUP
apologist, but at the same time, I am not an agile purist either. I am
a pragmatist… it's all about getting projects delivered!
This blog actually predated my time with VersionOne. Here is a link the post on my personal blog:
http://www.leadingagile.com/2007/09/agile-heart-of-unified-process.html
See you in Toronto!
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