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This 30 min experience report gives attendees another perspective on how one software company is approaching selling and executing user experience projects using Agile methodologies. Specifically, we will focus on our experience and approach to expanding User Research (UR) component in our projects. We feel that UR is vital to a successful software project but is the hardest part of User Experience to sell because it is often viewed as 1) taking more time, 2) costing more money, 3) slowing down development, and 4) unnecessary (“we already know the users”).

After 7 years of traditional IT delivery, Gap Inc. Direct decided to adopt Agile. This experience report discusses three key factors that contributed to our successful (and ongoing) Agile transformation: 1. Ambitious Pilot Project 2. Massive Investment in Continuous Integration 3. Rethinking our Assets

Overview
Learn from our experience in executing Agile in a complicated and integrated organization and culture at The City of Calgary. This experience report will be of particular interest to large organizations and those in government. We are are going to describe the lessons learned from our journey from first deciding to look at Agile to actually executing and evaluating it. Our particular viewpoint will focus on how this played out in a government IT organization that is highly structured.

Cultural Context
• Team dynamics were focused on managing the team as opposed to leading it.
• Process and its complexity could obscure the end goals and motivations of a team’s effort.
• Highly defined roles for all team members at times hampered needed communication and collaboration.
• Client participation was challenging to get and keep past requirements sign off.
• Teams were not empowered to make the decisions that directly impacted them and how they worked on a project.

ChannelAdvisor is an eCommerce SaaS provider in the online sales arena. In 2007 we decided to take on Scrum / XP as our Agile methodology in developing our products. Our overall adoption has been successful and we are driving further into Agility in 2008. However, some important lessons surfaced from our implementation.