program selection system

Whose Project is it Anyway? Presenters: Bonnie Aumann, Rob Kinyon

From organizing the backlog of stories to choosing a branching strategy, developers and clients can find themselves wondering who’s really driving the project. These problems are only exacerbated when an outside team is brought into the client-space. In this session we will explore organizational patterns and anti-patterns, particularly focusing on conflict resolution, via improvisational role-playing.

Adopting agile in a large organization is qualitatively different than it is for small organizations. It is not just a ‘scalability’ issue. In larger organizations, the adoption of Agile—even if it is ‘simply’ an isolated project here or there—will generate ripples of change that reverberate much further into the organization than we expect.

In this session we will investigate several ideas and concepts related to organizational change in order to equip managers and coaches with a means for approaching the transition to agile in their organization. We offer no particular ‘solutions’ here. Rather, I want to present some perspectives that I have come to think of as essential for large organizational change. Among the ideas we’ll be investigating are:

• Top-down vs. bottom-up change
• Planned, episodic change vs. Emergent, continuous change
• Change that is ‘Native’ and ‘Organic’ vs. change that is imported and based on ‘best practices’

Those of us who attend conferences or read articles see new ideas we want to take back to our organizations, but then we struggle to make something happen. This struggle has become especially apparent as enthusiastic agile development proponents want to encourage their teams to apply these approaches. We will provide successful change management strategies to help agile proponents and anyone who wants to influence others to adopt a new idea. Hear how to encourage people to become so involved and interested in new ideas that they want to change. Bring your frustrations!