program selection system

Being a product owner is a difficult job. BT has been using product owner teams to manage the details of “what should be built”. These teams own the content and the breakdown of user story epics into user stories for delivery teams and act as proxy customers to those delivery teams. This experience report examines a project, implementing an up to 24Mbps service over the 21CN network, which was successful in applying the approach and concludes with some advice on how best to apply Product Owner Teams.

It seems to be a common understanding that retrospectives are the major practice that enable agility. However, conducting virtual retrospectives is often not straight forward. One possibility is to conduct a retrospective at each site and then to swap the different findings afterwards. Another one is to facilitate a joint virtual retrospective using different virtual communication channels. In this workshop we will explore practices and facilitation techniques that have helped in different global projects. Moreover we’ll indicate supporting tools and how to prepare such a workshop.

This session is presented by a group of panelists – Esther Derby, Hubert Smits, Tamara Sulaiman, Samir Shah and Monica Yap. All of the panelists have experience working with successful distributed Agile teams, from offshore and onshore. They will share their experience and insights on how to face the common challenges arise from this environment. Topics such as how to start well, how to deal with time zones, will be discussed. During the session, the panelists will also answer specific questions from attendees.

This session is designed for agile practioners who are seeking to improve practices in large agile programs. It is targeted for experienced and inexperienced sponsors, product owners, scrum masters, project managers and people involved in business development and contract negociation.

Revised Proposal

Agile principles value people and communication over processes and tools. But, how do you manage the complexity of today’s development environment where teams span multiple time zones, continents and languages and successfully adapt Agile processes in such a way that teams reach optimal velocity? How do you facilitate communication and foster team-building? How can you empower each team member when the Scrum Master and Product Owner are located with one half of the team?

If planning for a large co-located 30+ development team is not enough to make you want to pull your hair out then try a 30+ development team located across several time zones, in places with different cultures and languages. Now, you’ve reached a level in the Agile planning game that would send most product owners running home to their mommies.