program selection system

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY:

You need organizational change tools that reflect agility: accessible by most everyone without in-depth learning, adaptable for your particular situation, and applicable, providing tangible results without months of fuzzy “prep” work. We think we have an answer for you. You will become acquainted with an organizational/cultural change framework and try your hand at applying it to a common problem. Our goal is to give you enough information so you can decide if further investigation is warranted.

Using agile development methods can deliver business value, high productivity, joyful collaboration, shared accountability, and fun. But getting there can be difficult. Teams that are transitioning to agile often encounter resistance, fear, chaos, and uncertainty. In this workshop you will learn how to use—and you will experience firsthand—a technique called “appreciative inquiry.” This approach leverages the wisdom of the group to determine and apply the best strategies (such as risk evaluation, top-down, and skunks-works methods) to ease your team’s transition to agile.

Audience

Since people in all roles are involved in organizational change, both as change agents and as resisters, the target audience for the session includes anyone who is interested in learning more about the forms of resistance they may see in their own organization, and how to overcome it. Because of the nature of the information, there is no real separation among beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels; nor is there any arcane material geared specifically for either technical or management personnel.

Value

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!

Servant leadership, pair programming, transparency and self-organising teams are evil. They make people leave! Or don’t they?

Agile values and practices often cause enough pain for someone to leave the team or even the company. On the other hand they can retain or even attract people.

What can you do if you want people to stay or go?

After this session you can deal with labour turnover, or lack thereof. You will understand the systemic aspects of labour turnover by turning stories told by participants into diagrams of effects.