program selection system

Organizational change is hard, and often teams attempt to implement Agile practices and processes without management support. While a key factor in the success of Agile efforts is adequate process support from senior levels, often agile practices and processes can be used at the grass roots level to improve the culture, which can lead to management buy-in.

Adopting agile in a large organization is qualitatively different than it is for small organizations. It is not just a ‘scalability’ issue. In larger organizations, the adoption of Agile—even if it is ‘simply’ an isolated project here or there—will generate ripples of change that reverberate much further into the organization than we expect.

In this session we will investigate several ideas and concepts related to organizational change in order to equip managers and coaches with a means for approaching the transition to agile in their organization. We offer no particular ‘solutions’ here. Rather, I want to present some perspectives that I have come to think of as essential for large organizational change. Among the ideas we’ll be investigating are:

• Top-down vs. bottom-up change
• Planned, episodic change vs. Emergent, continuous change
• Change that is ‘Native’ and ‘Organic’ vs. change that is imported and based on ‘best practices’

You need organizational change tools that reflect agility: accessible by most everyone without in-depth learning, adaptable for your particular situation, and applicable, providing tangible results without months of fuzzy “prep” work. We think we have an answer for you. You will become acquainted with an organizational/cultural change framework and try your hand at applying it to a common problem. Our goal is to give you enough information so you can decide if further investigation is warranted.

Abstract: Traditional corporate accounting standards and practices have evolved around a waterfall based IT investment model where IT projects are delivered in discrete, time boxed phases. As organizations adopt an iterative agile development and delivery model, they may encounter inherent constraints and points of friction with legacy accounting practices and policies which could adversely impact Agile adoption and scalability.

The growing trend of companies to widely adopt agile across their organizations has created change far beyond what happens at the level of the team. This panel examines issues surrounding enterprise agile adoption. We will explore topics such as agile transformation and initiation, leadership, culture change, hiring, incentives and technology. Experts from diverse large companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Salesforce.com, The Gap and Barclay’s Global Investors will discuss these issues, grounded by their experiences.

This session is for any Agile coach or leader who is facing challenges and looking for creative ways for facing them.

In this practical session we hope to do two things. First, mine some of the hardest, real-world problems that attending Scrum Masters and other Agile Leaders have faced within their teams. We’ll do this by breaking into teams and having each team first brainstorm a list of challenges and then dot-vote on what they think is the toughest problem.

ChannelAdvisor is an eCommerce SaaS provider in the online sales arena. In 2007 we decided to take on Scrum / XP as our Agile methodology in developing our products. Our overall adoption has been successful and we are driving further into Agility in 2008. However, some important lessons surfaced from our implementation.

KeyCorp, a financial institution with $100 billion in assets, has been working hard to get our new projects started fast, on the right path, with a solid foundation. We took the advice of the famed rock band The Beatles, when they sang, “Come together, right now.” This session shares a program we developed called Agile Connections, which brings people together early in a project to get it started on the right foot. I will also provide my outline, sample agendas, tips for planning, and suggestions for making up your own.

WHAT IS KEYCORP