program selection system

Congratulations! You’ve just been granted initial funding for your Agile project! As the product manager you understand the market opportunity for your new Beer Miles rewards loyalty program, but how do you go from the business case to a product backlog? Your accountant says return on investment is key, the Marketing Director says user experience and community are key, while the IT says scalability and fault tolerance are high priorities. You have limited time and budget, and the pressure is on to make the product a success.

Management loves the idea of metrics. Project teams, though, hate it: no one likes to be examined like a bug under a magnifying glass. It’s such a shame that this is the perception, because constructive metrics are a project team’s best defense against insanity. When well done, metrics practice is like the martial art of Aikido, which uses an opponents own energy and momentum - and in this case self-interest and responsibilities - to overcome them. This course explores constructive metrics at the release level that can be used as leading indicators.

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.

The first principle of Agile is to deliver value to the customer. Understanding Business Value better can often do more than anything else to make your efforts better. We need to improve our Business Value Engineering.

In this Discovery Session, we intend to look at the principles and values that underlie Business Value and its uses. And we will look at how we practice Business Value Engineering throughout the life of the effort. Expect challenges, not pat answers. This discussion will enable you to improve your Business Value Engineering.

As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more companies are discovering that simply breaking down projects into small iterations is not sufficient. Agile methods require changes in management, analysis, architecture, design, testing, quality assurance as well as project management. Given the large adjustments required, where can a team or enterprise look for guidance in its transition? The principles of Lean Software Development provide such guidance.

As leaders in a large IT organization of a Fortune 250 company, we leveraged our agile project experiences to transform how IT manages its portfolios of projects. Along the way we ran headlong into inherent conflicts between agile and legacy corporate processes and mindsets. We recognized the need to transform those legacy processes and mindsets to effectively manage project investments in an agile manner. In this session we discuss the challenges we faced and the successes we realized with IT investment funding, change management, and governance.

Rich will answer business leadership questions such as…
* “Why should I pay for two to do the job of one?”
* “Why should I pay for unit testing? Get it right the first time!”
* “We paid for the cubes and now you want me to take them down?”
* “Why do we have to visit weekly, didn’t you read our requirements document?”
* “How could people work in a loud environment like yours?”
* “If you use paired programming, how can you tell who the best programmers are?”

If you don’t pair program, have a distributed team, or your iteration is 5 weeks long, are you Agile? In this session we will debate both sides of this issue as we seek to answer the questions –“how much compromise is too much?” and “when is Agile no longer agile?” Do you give up on the concept of Agile Development altogether because you are not adopting the whole methodology or do you look for ways to use as much as possible even if your environment is not ideal?

Everybody is talking about “delivering business value”, but what does this mean in Scrum? Scrum emphasizes the Product Owner’s role in prioritizing backlogs and building the highest priority features first. But how can a Product Owner demonstrate measurable value delivered? More importantly, how do leaders articulate the real project or product goals for everyone to clearly understand?

The answers to these questions go beyond Scrum’s world of features, user stories, product and sprint backlogs. Attend this session to learn a method for delivering measurable business value with Scrum.

Yogi Berra is quoted as saying, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Effective management of a software portfolio is a challenge that many companies ignore, avoid or fail to follow through because it is too hard. Many approaches to portfolio management get so complex that decisions fail to get made. But what would “barely sufficient” portfolio management look like? In this hands-on tutorial we review some basic portfolio management guidelines and introduce a simulation game where participants make decisions about which investments a company makes.