From High-performing to Hyper-performing Agile teams
This submission is to share the success of three successful Agile implementations that are both unique in their implementation while sharing many commonalities that have created high performance teams. Each presenter will give a fifteen minute overview of their Agile implementation then join a facilitated panel discussion and Q&A with the audience.
NEW UPDATE: All three presenters were chosen as they have both been hands-on as well as overseeing their Agile projects for more than two years. They have used Agile methods at multiple companies and it is interesting to see how they have applied their lessons learnt to getting their current organizations to new heights. Jeff Sutherland is the CTO Of PatientKeeper and the person who kicked off Scrum and has been constantly evolving the process to get the team to new heights. Rob Mee from Pivotal has been hands-on both coaching and coding to setup his company as well as working closely with clients and is constantly involved with his teams. Jason Titus was the Director then VP for Yahoo mail and has been a driving force through their inception at a managerial level to remove roadblocks and help the teams perform effectively.
Information on the speakers and topics: Jeff Sutherland is CTO of PatientKeeper. They build a software platform for all physician applications and connect any frontend device (smartphone, PDA, Blackberry, webtop) to any backend clinical system in large hospital networks including HCA which has over 170 hospitals. PatientKeeper’s Type C Scrum was documented in a paper presented at Agile 2005 where they multithread sprints through multiple teams for extreme performance. They consistently ran ten times as fast as their carefully selected outsourced waterfall team in India until the Board terminated all outsourcing. In 2007, PatientKeeper’s Scrum implementation produced a hyperproductive revenue state and they quadrupled revenue in one year.
Rob Mee is the CEO of Pivotal Labs in San Francisco. Rob runs a consulting firm of more than 50 developers focused on building applications for start-ups and investor groups, primarily using Ruby on Rails. Rob will share Pivotal’s techniques for working with many and varied clients simultaneously: how to maintain consistent and predictable velocity, how to scale teams without losing efficiency,and how to move developers fluidly between multiple teams and multiple products.
Jason Titus is the VP of Engineering for Yahoo! mail, the largest web mail provider in the world. Yahoo! Mail uses Scrum across large-scale infrastructure projects to build some of the largest storage and metadata systems and has seen over 200% productivity increases some pre to post Agile adoption. Jason will share how they used Scrum to rebuild the backend of Yahoo! mail and mass storage, and how you apply iterative and incremental thinking to large-scale infrastructure.
Facilitator bio: Gabrielle Benefield is a Certified Scrum Trainer and was Senior Director of Agile Development at Yahoo! leading Yahoo!’s large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum, which now encompasses more than 200 teams projects and over 1500 employees in the US, India, Europe, and Asia. She is co-author of The Scrum Primer (www.scrumprimer.com).
Three 15 minute presentations of each case study. These will follow the same format and dig into how each person has approached core practices and techniques. The next 45 minutes will be a facillitated panel discussion with audience questions as well as pre-prepared questions on specific topics if there are gaps.