program selection system

Using agile development methods can deliver business value, high productivity, joyful collaboration, shared accountability, and fun. But getting there can be difficult. Teams that are transitioning to agile often encounter resistance, fear, chaos, and uncertainty. In this workshop you will learn how to use—and you will experience firsthand—a technique called “appreciative inquiry.” This approach leverages the wisdom of the group to determine and apply the best strategies (such as risk evaluation, top-down, and skunks-works methods) to ease your team’s transition to agile.

Specifically, you can start with a small, low-risk project; taking on a high-risk/high visibility project and declaring that agile is the way to success (top-down); start with a skunk-works project and then marketing agile to the rest of the organization (bottom-up); engage external consultants to train and coach teams, building expertise through practice and retrospection, and more.

What really works?

Do different techniques work better in different situations? What are effective ways to market the power and promise of agile? What are the best ways to discover transition risks and challenges in your organization so that you can most effectively mitigate them? What role does the personalities of key players, or their positions of power, play in your success? Should the transition to agile be driven by management, or by IT (information technology)? Does the type of software product being developed affect successful agile transitions?

Using an appreciative inquiry approach, you’ll explore the most successful ways to actively and positively start and sustain the transition to agile in your organization and on your project. In appreciative inquiry (see: http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org/), you seek the positive core of your topic using peak experiences to appreciate what is, to imagine what might be, to determine what should be, and then to create what will be.

You will focus on developing a set of effective, workable strategies by (1) topic area (selecting projects, managing the start-up, engaging customers, selecting business or technology partners within the organization, marketing agile) and by (2) project (high risk versus low risk, project size, project impact on the bottom line, team profile). For each strategy, you’ll define the criteria for deciding which transitioning approaches are best in which circumstances, and you’ll define specific tools or techniques that aid in success.

At the conclusion of this entirely interactive workshop, you will be able to:

• Identify elements and circumstances that contribute to a successful agile transition

• Understand how your project’s profile and people factors impact a successful transition

• Name specific techniques and activities that productively and positively enable a successful transition

• Experience how an appreciative inquiry approach can be used to tackle difficult issues

• Experience how participatory techniques capture the imagination and energize a group to produce a single outcome