program selection system

90 Word Summary:

Drawing from our experience implementing Agile not only across cultural and physical boundaries with on/off shore blended teams, but within limitations that aren’t so obvious - we play an interactive game to learn about how people from diverse groups with different learning styles can gain knowledge and insight in cooperative and competitive settings. We will draw from this workshop’s experiential learning to feed a larger discussion about intercultural work groups, whether these groups are from different countries or different work disciplines.

Premise

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Using the analogy to code smells and their refactoring (Fowler, 2000), the tutorial introduces cultural smells, as well as refactoring activities, for cases in which agile software development is considered and adopted. The participants become familiar with patterns of cultural smells and appropriate refactoring activities, and are guided to check their fitness for their organizations as well as to develop new ones.

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY:

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.

Cultural diversity has become the norm in the software industry. It’s not unusual to work with people from across the country or across the world.

Working with people from different cultures can be a great opportunity; it can also be challenging and puzzling.

In this session, we’ll use a simulation to explore what it’s like to work with people from a different culture.

We’ll look at the ways that culture determines how people decide, listen, and act. And we’ll learn several tools to reframe differences in order to reduce misunderstandings and improve productivity.

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

Four years ago the New Media division of the BBC began adopting Agile project management practices for web, interactive TV and mobile product development. They proved to be an instant success enabling teams to work more efficiently and transparently than ever before. More recently there began to be concerns on the ground that Agile would be seen as a passing fad by some newly appointed key senior managers, and coupled with departmental restructuring led to a belief that Agile would be challenged before being put aside.

Underestimating the impacts of cultural diversity on your team can be disastrous, creating barriers and even team breakdown. Most leaders aren’t even aware of the influences that different cultures can have on team dynamics. These impacts can be even more pronounced on agile self organizing teams.