program selection system

Salesforce.com took a big bang approach to implement a SCRUM method, with huge success. This meant big changes to how Product Managers work, how we interact with the team, and manages dependencies between teams.

No more 200 page functional specs, no more waiting 12-18 months before features got into customers hands. No more changes to the release dates – how do we survive?

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.

For Info Tech, Inc., the transition to Agile practices three years ago lead to a change in the way we collaborate and contract with our long term, mostly government customers. Our evolution covered Time and Materials (T&M) contracts, a Hybrid of T&M and Fixed Price and most recently a Fixed Price, Fixed Scope, Fixed Schedule contract that supports Agile development. Our goal has been to meet our customer’s needs for predictable results while maintaining our commitment to agile practices.

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.

This course will use the release planning game to explore various project planning strategies. The game is played in small groups of approximately four players. Both programmers and customers may play, in any combination.

In each cycle of the game, the players plan and “implement” a product. Each time through, they learn some new lessons enabling them to plan and implement better next time. Scoring is based upon each team’s total return on investment

short form for 90 word session description:

Basic backlogs for a simple project are easy to prioritize and sequence. Backlogs for complex programs of many teams and many interdependent projects, (or complex product suites) are harder to measure value and prioritize. Deriving the optimal story sequence in the release plan in order to maximize project value requires a more scientific approach.

Our organization just ended a successful pilot project using agile methods. As a result management has decided to introduce agile across IT. There are still questions about adopting agile across the organization:

• Who will ensure we have the “right” architecture for our future needs?
• Who is responsible for software quality reuse?
• Does agile work large-scale projects
• Who will focus on the big picture?

This talk will present patterns and methods about how an agile organization manages architecture concerns.