Topics from Agile India 2015
I recently returned from India where I presented at the 11th Agile India conference in Bangalore. As usual it was a great conference and there were some amazing presentations.
Following on from my previous topics of business agility in 2014, I gave three presentations on the interface between IT and business, agile contracts and value stream mapping.
How Much Will This Cost
"How much will this cost?"
"How long will it take?"
"What am I going to get?"
These are the questions that every Agile project gets asked at some point. And while "as much as your willing to spend", "as long as necessary" and "whatever you ask for" are perfectly acceptable, many customers are uncomfortable with these answers. This may reflect more on the customer then the team, but can lead to the misconception that the development team is writing themselves a blank cheque. How then does an Agile team define and scope a project where the customer requires fixed time, cost or scope?
Selling Agile Across the Enterprise
You've started on Agile project. You've probably got IT management on board. You've read the manifesto. You've got a wall covered in post-its. You’re probably not using pair programming but you’re following most other Scrum and XP practices. But now you have a problem. Operations, HR and finance can’t keep up. Ops is having problems (or just refusing to) deploy each iteration. HR won’t let you form self-organising teams and don't know how to write KPI’s to support collaborative work practices. And finance wants a 3 year budget with fully costed initiatives.
Starting with VSM and Kanban
So you’ve heard about this Kanban thing and want to know where to start, or maybe you’ve been using it for a while and you want to know where to go. In this hands-on workshop, we'll start at the very beginning and teach you how to build a Value Stream Map and use that to define your initial Kanban and WIP limits.