program selection system

The 21st century team encompasses employees, customers and partners working in- concert, often distributed globally. Benefits of a global labor pool have themselves introduced their own costs associated with the complex feedback loops that develop bet these teams. We recognize that the level of complexity in the enterprise will continue to grow and teams need to be outfitted with the right tools to reduce impediment to communication, maintain continuity and drive management through intelligence from the ground.

This session isn’t a conventional presentation at all: it’s an interactive workshop in which everyone participates.

We all know folks who seem to be naturally creative, outrageously productive, somehow able to do things we can’t do. We call them “talented,” “artistic,” “super intelligent,” or some other word that means they’ve got an inherent ability that we don’t have. Thing is, most of what we call talent is actually skill, and can be learned. Not only can it be learned (by you), but it can be practiced, and you can get better at it with practice.

Without a doubt, agile processes rely on effective collaborative teams. But we can’t just throw a group of individuals together and expect an agile team to just happen. It takes knowledge of team strategies, skillful team building and ongoing coaching to build and maintain high-performing agile teams.

Short Abstract [88 words]

Sticky notes (aka Post-it Notes [tm]) are the lingua franca of remembering pesky tasks…yet their real potential lies in effectively and rapidly organizing collaborative group work. Don’t underestimate these simple tools: it’s amazing what powerful results you can get from a $2.00 office supply investment.

Agile evangelists frequently skip the realities of the world. This is especially true when it comes to estimation. It often appears as if authors and presenters live in a world in which the customer is always a deep-pocketed in-house resource, with an abundance of confidence in the development team.

The realities, however, is that whether doing in-house development or contracting, the customer expects estimates for the development work. Potential benefits have to be weighed against estimated costs.

This talk deals with why estimation is crucial also in an Agile world.

Drawing from the art of improvisation, Agile coaches Jim York and Tobias Mayer lead this fun and fast moving session to explore healthy and innovative ways of communicating and collaborating. Many Agile teams suffer from dysfunctional interpersonal communication born of learned “bad” behaviors. These stifling exchanges keep individuals entrenched in old ideas and inhibit forward progress.

Some Extreme Programming practices — such as paired programming and open and collaborative workspaces — present challenges to the traditional hiring process as most interview candidates have trouble imagining the transition to such an environment. A traditional interview process might yield candidates who are technically competent, yet ill-prepared and perhaps even unwilling to undertake such a dramatic change to their own ideas of software development practices. This is obviously a problem.

More and more teams find themselves working in an incredibly chaotic environment. How the team reacts to the stimuli in that environment can mean the difference between success and failure. Discovering and applying the rules that will best guide us to success in this complex ecosystem is a daunting task. Where else can we look for examples of this kind of complex group behavior?

Presentation Description

The true measure of project progress is working software - or is it? Our team thought it was, and we were wrong. This is the story of our team, a team that set out to build a new order tracking system for a worldwide vehicle manufacturer, and failed.

Agile practices emerge in a collaborative environment. As the leader on several projects, I saw the emergence of iterative development, test first, evolving functional specs, pair programming, minimal documentation, and customer involvement at every step of the way.