program selection system

Do you feel overwhelmed by the number of sessions to choose from? Would you like to get a bit of help in finding your way around? Would you like to get a bird’s eye overview of what the Culture stage has to offer?

In this session, we will give you some guidance by introducing the Culture stage and providing an overview of the good stuff that will be happening there. There will also be time for your questions about the conference and how to make the best of the time you have to spend in the sessions.

Whose Project is it Anyway? Presenters: Bonnie Aumann, Rob Kinyon

From organizing the backlog of stories to choosing a branching strategy, developers and clients can find themselves wondering who’s really driving the project. These problems are only exacerbated when an outside team is brought into the client-space. In this session we will explore organizational patterns and anti-patterns, particularly focusing on conflict resolution, via improvisational role-playing.

Self-organization is a key concept in agile software development, but teams are often more used to taking orders than making their own decisions. Touchstones Discussion Project prepares participants to take responsibility for their own future by applying structured discussion techniques that encourage them to examine and adapt their own behavior, their peer relationships, and their culture. Those who join us in this interactive Touchstones session will experience the power of group learning in a setting that emphasizes respectful participation, collaborative skill-building, active listening, and participative leadership.

This presentation outlines one team’s shift from the traditional waterfall methodology to an agile approach for web development. The transformation occurred over the course of an advising system project at The Ohio State University. Using the five stages of grieving as a metaphor, we will describe how the team moved from denial that waterfall was failing to acceptance that agile practices would be the best way to deliver the mission-critical application. Ultimately, the entire team re-envisioned itself, transformed its business practices, and evolved into a significantly more agile shop.

Organizational change - for example, the introduction of Agile practices - is like an infection. At first, the infection is localized and the body politic ignores it. Eventually and inevitably, the body politic will take notice, as its expectations and habits are disturbed. At that time, it will marshall its immune system and seek out and destroy the infectious change. IT management’s & business’s immune system is its governance processes. Unless governance processes and expectations are properly aligned with new agile and lean processes, agile and lean change will fail.

You’re the executive-sponsor of your division’s foray into agile. It was successful with the first development team; you saw good results with the second and third; by the fourth you knew you had something! Now you want to roll it out across the entire organization. But each of your teams approaches agile differently. You’d like a consistent approach, but you don’t want to stifle the culture of cooperation and coordination that agile has brought to the organization. How do you scale with a consistent approach that also supports The Manifesto?

At last! After ten years of successfully coaching teams into XP, Mike Hill reveals the secret to agile transition: throwing a continuous good party.

There are several keys to hosting a good transition party:

• The Pre-Party Prep:
  • Invitations — Who to get involved, and how.
  • The Dance Floor — Preparing the workspace.
  • Food & Favors — Getting everyone in the mood.
• The Early Days:
  • Finding a Groove — Getting your team into rhythm.
  • Path-Smoothing — Dealing with incompatible guests.
  • Games — Keeping the team entertained.
• The Steady State:

This session describes how a large scale team transitioning from Waterfall to Agile while going through all phases of Tuckman’s model non-linearly. Non-linear transitions is a key for the management to realize in order to help the team reach the next level quicker. I present the issues we encountered, lessons we learned, and how we coped with difficult situations in each of the four phases of the Tuckman’s Model of team development.

In 1996, Landmark Graphics was a company that had grown from a startup 10 years prior into a leading provider of software applications in oil and gas exploration. The growth via acquisition had resulted in a collection of corporate cultures separated by prior organization, geography, product line and business domain. The visionary leadership realized that the best way to create integrated solutions was by integrating the people. This example of leading collaboration has paid off through increased profitability and market share.

Many companies are now adopting Agile methods to hopefully fix problems with delivering software in a timely, sustainable manner. However, most people seem to think that the transformation will be quick, and that once implemented, people can proceed along, with little or no change throughout.