Conference Papers and Presentations

This is a collection of CC-BY-SA licensed papers and presentations that I have delivered at conferences in Australia and South East Asia over the past few years. These presentations cover a variety of topics including ICT management, Agile Methods, Business Intelligence and several purely technical courses. If you would like me to speak at a conference on one of the topics below (or any other topic), please contact me.

Business and ICT Leadership

These papers cover a variety of Business and ICT leadership topics from agile business management to open source licensing.

• If you need to start a project, you’ve already failed - I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you’ve already failed.
• From Lean Startup to the Agile Enterprise - Regardless of whether you come from IT, HR, Finance or Sales, this presentation will provide engaging and enlightening case studies of Agile beyond IT; from lean startups to large enterprises.
• 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.
• Agile Business Management - This presentation will demonstrate a variety of agile methods and processes that can be applied in the day-to-day management of organisations to improve overall quality, adaptability, and risk management.
• Business Growth and Customer Acquisition the Agile Way - Whether you are a software vendor, consultancy or just an independent agile coach, you will be focused on your business, and specifically, your business growth. This presentation will look at how to build your business, the agile way.
• Breaking Down the Barriers: Communities of Practice and Cross-Silo Communication - Skills sharing, collaboration and cross-silo communication, necessary for Agile projects, can be difficult in matrix organisations where common business practices may be shared across multiple business units.
• The Agile Business Leader - The modern economy is changing rapidly; technologies that did not exist 10 years ago are becoming the foundation of succesful businesses. In order to leverage this new economy, business leaders need to become, in a word, Agile.
• Free as in Kittens - Takes a look at the various costs of ownership, and proposes methods of increasing open source uptake within corporations.
• The Soft Skills in Software - The difference between a good programmer and a great one isn't the ability to write a kernel module in LISP, but the ability to communicate with your colleagues and customers.

Agile

• Adaptable Engineering: 3D Printing and Agile - Evan Leybourn and Matthew Croucher</a> co-present a fast-paced, interactive seminar, culminating in a live demo will show how an Agile team can iterate and print products using this technology.
• How much will this cost? - This presentation will provide guidance and direction on how to quote for and budget Agile projects, as well as how to change the questions in the first place.
• Let's Kill an Agile Project (an Agile Game) - Other talks and games will teach you how to run a successful Agile project. Only this one will teach you how to ruin an Agile project (More importantly, this activity will teach you "how" Agile projects can fail and the reason behind many common Agile practices.)
• Agile in the Global Economy: Managing Distributed Agile Teams - Agile projects are increasingly being conducted by geographically distributed teams. Whether teams are separated across countries or people are taking advantage of changing business practices and working from home, without the right tools and techniques, distributed Agile teams can be less efficient or downright unproductive.
• Starting with Kanban: A practical workshop on Value Stream Mapping and WIP - 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 inital Kanban and WIP limits.
• The Role of Quality Control in Cross-Functional Teams - How do the roles and responsibilities of test and quality control professionals change within an Agile team.
• Autopsy of a failed agile project or Death of a thousand cuts - This presentation will forensically examine a failed agile (Scrum, XP, & TDD) project with the goal of helping agile project managers avoid similar issues in future.
• Implementing Agile Within the Australian Public Service - Reviews the agile management, development and q/a methods that we have used to build successful agile projects and governance within the Australian public service.
• Agile for Open Source - This presentation takes a look at how agile methodologies can be applied to community open source projects
• Agile Business Management - This presentation will demonstrate a variety of agile methods and processes that can be applied in the day-to-day management of organisations to improve overall quality, adaptability, and risk management.
• Agile Business Intelligence - Based on common agile management methods, this presentation discusses the processes and workflows required to manage a Business Intelligence team or project in a flexible, iterative and agile manner.
• Estimating Duration or how long will this take - Scrum provides a mechanism for estimating work, but converting that into a specific duration can be very difficult. This presentation will cover an estimation mechanism developed, based on story points, to cater for these situations.

Business Intelligence

• Agile Business Intelligence - Based on common agile management methods, this presentation discusses the processes and workflows required to manage a Business Intelligence team or project in a flexible, iterative and agile manner.

Historical Courses (for reference only)

• HISTORICAL: Management Analytics and Visualisation - Utilising the best and worst examples of information visualisation, we will look at new ways for senior executive to understand and visualise the different types of information produced in their organisation.
• HISTORICAL: Open Source Toolchain - This presentation looks at the applications available to help project planning, resource distribution, staff communication, source control, database development, unit testing, issue tracking, compiling, and distribution.
• HISTORICAL: Commercial Open Source Software - Obsolete presentation from 2006. How do you make a profitable business writing software that you have to give away?
• HISTORICAL: Data Warehousing with Open Source Technologies (or why not to use Data Marts in 2010) - This session will discuss the open source technologies that can be brought together to provide data warehouse capabilities at a fraction of the setup costs for a traditional environment.
• HISTORICAL: Data Warehousing HOWTO - This paper will cover the design methodologies used in designing a data warehouse and the open source software available to bring it all together.
• HISTORICAL: PostgreSQL Tips and Tricks for Developers - The roles between the developer and the DBA is often blurred. This paper covers many tips and tricks a developer can use to improve and optimise an application by understanding and writing better SQL.
• HISTORICAL: Writing an SQL parser with PyParsing - Obsolete presentation from OSDC 2008. I no longer present this paper.
• HISTORICAL: Using Dojo Dijits and the Dojox Grid (Javascript framework) - Obsolete presentation from OSDC 2008. I no longer present this paper.

Sample Feedback From Attendees

• "Controversial topic, delivered gently and charismatically. Though raises more questions (which is good)" - Anonymous feedback from AgileEE
• "The most valuable presentation from day 1. Perfect interaction with the audience. Performance ++. Very practical and comprehensive." - Anonymous feedback from AgileEE
• “Awesome speaker, very interactive” - Game Services Group
• “Good and valuable advice from [Evan]. Clarity and style of presentation was great” – Dell
• "Simplified way of presenting concepts & we could relate to our work environment” - ST Ericsson
• “[Evan] has extensive experience & was able to give practical insights & applications” - Misys