Crossing the Agile Divide: Scrum or Kanban? by Johanna Rothman, Scott W. Ambler, Suzanne Robertson, Ron Jeffries, Peter Kaminski, Israel Gat, Hubert Smits, and Hillel Glazer In this issue, we depart from our usual Executive Report format to bring you an opinion piece on a battle confronting the Agile community today: Scrum versus Kanban. Our lead author, Johanna Rothman, sets forth her argument that one is not necessarily better than the other; they are just different and it’s up to the organization to figure out which method is best under which circumstance. In response, seven of Cutter’s Agile experts discuss their views on crossing the Agile divide. Each implores those seeking to be Agile to first and foremost learn and understand the principles behind the practices. Agile Product & Project Management Vol. 15, No. 2 NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION • For authorized use, contact Cutter Consortium: +1 781 648 8700 • [email protected]
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Transcript
Crossing the Agile Divide:
Scrum or Kanban?
by Johanna Rothman, Scott W. Ambler, Suzanne
Robertson, Ron Jeffries, Peter Kaminski, Israel Gat,
Hubert Smits, and Hillel Glazer
In this issue, we depart from our usual Executive Report format to bring you
an opinion piece on a battle confronting the Agile community today: Scrum
versus Kanban. Our lead author, Johanna Rothman, sets forth her argument
that one is not necessarily better than the other; they are just different and
it’s up to the organization to figure out which method is best under which
circumstance. In response, seven of Cutter’s Agile experts discuss their views
on crossing the Agile divide. Each implores those seeking to be Agile to first
and foremost learn and understand the principles behind the practices.
Agile Product & Project Management
Vol. 15, No. 2
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION • For authorized use, contact
12Rothman, Johanna, and Shane Hastie.“Lessons Learned from LeadingWorkshops About GeographicallyDistributed Agile Teams.” IEEE Software,March/April 2013.
13Ambler, Scott W., and Mark Lines.Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner'sGuide to Agile Software Delivery in theEnterprise. IBM Press, 2012.
enterprise maturity is particularly important given the complexities
modern organizations face.
The DAD framework supports multiple delivery lifecycles and provides
advice for how to choose between them.14 This includes a Scrum-based
Agile lifecycle, a Kanban-based Lean lifecycle, a continuous delivery
lifecycle, and an exploratory lifecycle based on Lean startup strategies.
Every customer that I’ve worked with over the last two years has had
teams following different lifecycles. One organization had several teams
following the Agile version of the lifecycle, two teams following the
Lean lifecycle, and one team experimenting with continuous delivery.
Another organization had a large program where most of the subteams
followed a Lean strategy with one subteam following an Agile lifecycle
to handle the larger “chunks” of work that came in from time to time.
Another reason why it’s important to adopt a framework that supports
multiple delivery lifecycles is process improvement. The 12th princi-
ple behind the Agile Manifesto states: “At regular intervals, the team
reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its
behavior accordingly.”15 The implication is that as a team learns and
improves, the overall lifecycle that it follows will reflect these changes.
I’ve worked with teams that start with an Agile-based lifecycle and then
over time evolve into a Lean-based approach. I even met one team that
evolved from a Lean strategy to an Agile one, an evolutionary path that
made perfect sense for that team.
Agile or Lean?
I will take a stab at addressing the question, “Which works better?”
and I’ll do so by giving two answers. First, as Johanna indicates, it really
depends on the situation you find yourself in. Your team’s culture and
skill set are the primary determinants of which lifecycle you will choose.
My experience is that you can apply Agile and Lean approaches in a
variety of situations, including with large teams, geographically distrib-
uted teams, and teams facing other complexities. More importantly,
my research data backs this claim.16 Naturally, a large team will work
differently than a small team. A team in a life-critical regulatory sit-
uation will work different than a team in a nonregulatory situation.
A team working with an outsourcing company will work differently
than a team that doesn’t. Teams need to tailor their process to reflect the
situation they face, and DAD provides the guidance they need to do so.
Second, my recent research has found that teams following a Lean
approach, on average, seem to be more successful than teams following
an Agile approach.17 On average, Lean teams are perceived to provide
a bit better stakeholder value, product quality, time to market, and
ROI compared to Agile and iterative teams. And, of course, Agile and
iterative teams are significantly better at all four of these success criteria
than waterfall teams. Note that these are all averages and your mileage
may vary, but it’s always interesting to have industry data at hand.
I’d like to end with this thought: don’t think in terms of Scrum versus
Kanban, or even in terms of Agile versus Lean. Instead, think in terms of
Your team’s culture and skill set are
the primary determinants of which
lifecycle you will choose.
14Ambler, Scott W. “A Full DeliveryLifecycle.” Disciplined AgileDelivery, 30 December 2012 (http://disciplinedagiledelivery.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/a-full-agile-delivery-lifecycle).
15“Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto”(http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html).
16“Agility at Scale Survey.” Ambysoft,2012 (www.ambysoft.com/surveys/stateOfITUnion201209.html).
17“2013 IT Project Success Rates SurveyResults.” Ambysoft, 2014 (www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2013.html).
www.cutter.comEXECUTIVE REPORT 8
what approach is best for your team. You’ll find that you end up pick-
ing and choosing strategies from various sources, something the DAD
process decision framework was specifically designed to help you with.
SCRUM OR KANBAN? IS THIS THE RIGHT QUESTION? BY SUZANNE ROBERTSON
Talking about and contrasting Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and any other
methods that label themselves “Agile” should be a useful way of
learning more about which approach increases your ability to be
more agile in which circumstances. But focusing on the mechanics of
the techniques often has the result of missing the real issue: what are
we trying to improve, and how will we know when we’ve done it?
As Johanna points out (and my experience concurs): “There is nothing
new about Agile. We are merely learning how to more successfully
apply Agile and Lean to projects and teams. But, in some ways, we’ve
known this all along. The challenge is in how to apply it.”
So what are the factors that lead people to focus more on techniques,
methods, and procedures than the problems that the techniques are
trying to overcome?
Techniques Are Tangible
Human beings, regardless of their job titles, prefer to focus on things
they consider to be tangible. For example, I often hear business analysts
complaining that business stakeholders don’t state their requirements;
instead, they come up with solutions. For example:
n “I need an interim total down here on the right of the screen.”
And then the analyst has to dig behind the why of the solution to
discover what the real problem is:
n “Why do you need this interim total?”
n “Because I need to write it down so that I can compare the figure on
the next screen.”
... and so on, until the analyst understands that the real problem is to
analyze and communicate the difference over time between two values
so that the special offers are made to the appropriate client. The busi-
ness stakeholder focused his attention on something tangible to him —
the current computer system and how it works — rather than analyzing
the real business problem and then working with the analyst to come
up with the best solution. This, of course, is why we have analysts
trained to look past the tangible and uncover the real business need.
The parallel with Agile techniques is that they are tangible; each one
has its own language, methods, procedures, cards, boards, language,
documents, review procedures, stories, roles, iteration cycles, and so on.
Familiarity with one particular technique — doesn’t matter which one
— inevitably focuses practitioners on the tangible characteristics of how
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION • For authorized use, contact
Scott W. Ambler is a Senior Consultant with CutterConsortium’s Agile Product & Project Management and Business& Enterprise Architecture practices. He is the thought leaderbehind the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework,Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), the Agile Data(AD) method, and the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP),working with clients around the world to improve the waythey develop software. Mr. Ambler is coauthor of severalsoftware development books, including Disciplined AgileDelivery, Agile Modeling, The Elements of UML 2.0 Style, AgileDatabase Techniques, and The Enterprise Unified Process. He isalso a Senior Contributing Editor with Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Mr.Ambler has spoken at a wide variety of international confer-ences, including Agile 20XX, Software Development, IBM Innovate,Java Expo, and Application Development. He can be reached [email protected].
Israel Gat is Director of Cutter’s Agile Product & ProjectManagement practice, a Fellow of Cutter Business TechnologyCouncil, a Fellow of the Lean Systems Society, and a memberof the Trident Capital SaaS advisory board. He is recognizedas the architect of the Agile transformation at BMC Software,where under his leadership Scrum users increased from zeroto 1,000, resulting in nearly three times faster time to marketthan industry average and 20%-50% improvement in teamproductivity. Among other accolades for leading this trans-ition, Dr. Gat received the Innovator of the Year award fromApplication Development Trends in 2006. His executive careerspans top technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft,Digital, and EMC. He has led the development of productssuch as BMC Performance Manager and Microsoft OperationsManager, enabling the two companies to move toward next-generation system management technology. Dr. Gat is also wellversed in growing smaller companies and has held advisoryand venture capital positions for companies in new, high-growth markets. He currently splits his time between consultingand writing. Dr. Gat focuses on technical debt, large-scaleimplementations of Lean, and DevOps. His e-book, The ConciseExecutive Guide to Agile, explains how the three can be tiedtogether to form an effective software governance framework.Dr. Gat holds a PhD in computer science and an MBA. In addi-tion to publishing with Cutter and the IEEE, he posts frequentlyat The Agile Executive and tweets @agile_exec. He can be reachedat [email protected].
Hillel Glazer is a Senior Consultant with Cutter’s Agile Product& Project Management practice. He is founder, Principal, CEO,and all-around Performance Jedi of Entinex, Inc., a companywith global reach that focuses on generating powerful resultsfor high-performance operations among companies motivatedto be Lean, Agile, and achieve world-class levels of operationalexcellence. Mr. Glazer’s work in Lean and systems thinkingbegan in 1991 and since then he has become the world’s leadingauthority on bringing Lean and Agile values and principles into
the regulated world. Leveraging his education and experience asan aerospace engineer, he solves hairy complex business prob-lems with the same creativity and discipline used to put peopleon the moon and grandparents at graduations. By seeing clearlyinto complex problems, Mr. Glazer finds the root of difficultbusiness operational issues, exposes what’s going on, and thenworks with companies to find, design, and implement simple,elegant solutions to lower costs, raise profits, foster innovation,and improve quality and speed responsivity to the market. Mr.Glazer’s professional passion is to generate powerful results forhigh-performance operations among companies motivated to beLean and Agile and to pursue world-class levels of operationalexcellence. He is an in-demand speaker and presenter, widelyread, broadly published, and appears worldwide on topics per-taining to operational excellence. Mr. Glazer’s approaches havesuccessfully harmonized Lean and systems thinking into highlyregulated industries that demand adherence and governancewhile in pursuit of excellence and profits. His book HighPerformance Operations: Leverage Compliance to Lower Costs,Increase Profits, and Gain Competitive Advantage lays outexactly how he does it. He can be reached at hglazer@cutter.
Ron Jeffries is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium’sAgile Product & Project Management practice. He has more than30 years’ experience in leadership and development of commer-cial object-oriented, relational database, programming language,and operating systems software. Mr. Jeffries has particularexpertise in teaching and applying XP. He entered the XPmovement in its beginning, as the first full-time XP coach,working with Cutter Senior Consultant Kent Beck on the well-known C3 payroll system. He is coauthor, with AnnAnderson and Chet Hendrickson, of Extreme ProgrammingInstalled. He can be reached at [email protected].
Peter Kaminiski is a Senior Consultant with Cutter’s AgileProduct & Project Management practice. He has served as tech-nical cofounder for five Internet startups, including Socialtext,a leading provider of enterprise social software, and YipesCommunications, a pioneering provider of Ethernet WAN ser-vices. As a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mr. Kaminskiprovides intelligent and experienced insight into discussions ofproduct and service development and operations. He also has30 years’ experience in delivering interactive, consumer-facingproducts as a game designer and software developer. With hisstartup background, Mr. Kaminski has an eclectic and broadrange of knowledge and skills, from the detailed minutiae oflow-level code, networking and data representation to teamdynamics, Agile development, and business/technology collab-oration to overall technology architectures, strategic alignment,and high-level business and market strategy. He has a particularpassion for small team dynamics, enterprise collaboration toolsand techniques, wikis, social media, gamification, and cloudcomputing. Mr. Kaminski tweets @peterkaminski. He can bereached at [email protected].
About the Authors
www.cutter.comEXECUTIVE REPORT 22
Suzanne Robertson is a Senior Consultant with CutterConsortium’s Agile Product & Project Management practice.She is also Principal and founder of the Atlantic Systems Guild.Ms. Robertson’s work includes research and consulting onthe management, sociological, and technological aspects ofrequirements. Volere, the product of her research, is a completerequirements process and template for assessing requirementsquality and for specifying requirements. She is the author ofseveral papers on systems engineering and speaks at numerousconferences and universities. Ms. Robertson is a member ofthe IEEE and board member of the British Computer Society’sRequirements Groups. She is the founding editor of the require-ments column in IEEE Software. Ms. Robertson is coauthor, withJames Robertson, of Requirements-Led Project and Mastering theRequirements Process. Other interests include a passion for theopera, cooking, skiing, and finding out about curious things.She can be reached at [email protected].
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” isa Cutter Consultant who helps organizational leaders seeproblems in their product development by assisting them inrecognizing potential risks, seizing opportunities, and removingimpediments. She has been President of Rothman ConsultingGroup, Inc., since 1994. A frequent speaker and author on man-aging high-technology product development, Ms. Rothman iscurrently Technical Editor at AgileConnection.com; a columnistat StickyMinds.com and ProjectManagement.com; and bloggerfor Managing Product Development, Hiring Technical People, andCreate an Adaptable Life (all at jrothman.com). She was Chair forAgile 2009 and has written articles for Cutter IT Journal, SoftwareDevelopment, Better Software, IEEE Software, Crosstalk, and IEEEComputer. Ms. Rothman is the author of several books, includingManage Your Job Search; Hiring Geeks That Fit; Manage YourProject Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects;the 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guideto Modern, Pragmatic Project Management; Behind Closed Doors:Secrets of Great Management; Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers,Techies, & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People;and Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity andFinish More Projects. Currently, she is writing a book aboutAgile and Lean program management. She can be reached [email protected].
Hubert Smits is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium’sAgile Product & Project Management practice. He is an innovative,assertive, and goal-oriented Agile consultant, coach, and trainerwith a track record of successfully spearheading enterprise-levelAgile and Lean enablement efforts. As the lead consultant atCisco Voice Technology, Mr. Smits designed and implementedthe Agile software development lifecycle, replacing multiyearwaterfall processes with iterative product development cycles.At Cisco, more than 3,000 participants in product development,including executives, product managers, program managers, anddevelopment teams moved into their Scrum roles and processes.His customers and successes include companies such as Oracle,Avaya, BMC Software, AOL, Fender, General Electric Energy,Amdocs, MySpace, and Compete. Mr. Smits has a track record ofworking with globally distributed teams, contracting with andcoaching teams in India, Argentina, Israel, and Europe. Alongwith a keen sense of business acumen, he is an exceptional com-municator offering strong negotiation, problem resolution, andteam-building skills. Mr. Smits enjoys leveraging Agile princi-ples and practices to mobilize teams, establish focus, promotepositive organizational change, enhance performance, improvequality, and reduce team turnover. He specializes in workingwith large product development efforts in organizations thatrequire a gradual organization-wide move to Agile. Mr. Smitsis confident in restructuring software development lifecycles,interacting with IT parties, and managing the impact of organi-zational change on finance, product management, marketing,and sales. In addition to publishing with Cutter and the IEEE, heis a frequent speaker at Agile events and has published articleson planning with distributed teams as well as Agile planningand tracking. He can be reached at [email protected].
Make your software, systems, and software organization asource of sustainable competitive advantage in an era characterized by constant change. Customized training, consulting, and executive education from Cutter’s expertswill help you get there.
Agile LeadershipIn today’s fast moving world, organizationalagility is a necessity for business performance— and agile leadership is the foundationupon which organizational agility is created.
As an executive and change leader, CutterSenior Consultant Don MacIntyre has led largeand small engineering organizations throughsuccessful transformations. He’s helped manyleadership teams empower their organiza-tions. And now you can benefit from hison-the-job experience. Don MacIntyre’s 2-dayAgile Leadership workshop is designed to helpleaders succeed with their agile transformationand develop the leadership skills required toachieve organizational agility.
Over the course of this 2-day workshop, you’lldiscuss the complexity and uncertainty ofwork, trust and collaboration within yourorganization, Agile principles and frameworks,high performing teams, leadership agility,challenges for leaders when scaling agile, theimpact of leadership attitudes toward risk andchange, Agile approaches to change, organi-zational structures and metrics, governancepolicies, continuous improvement, and more.
The insight and leadership skills you will gainfrom Don MacIntyre — an expert who’swalked in your shoes — during this fast-moving workshop will enable your managersto be better, more effective — and more agile— leaders during your Agile Transformation.
Agile EnablementJump-start and guide your transition to agilemethods with Cutter’s team of expert practi-tioners. You’ll identify which agile practiceswill bring the greatest return on investment toyour organization. Our goal: to enable you toimplement agile methods quickly and effec-tively, shorten your product developmentschedule, and increase the quality of the resultant product. A typical agile enablementengagement contains five steps:
1. Education. We offer two introductory ses-sions: one customized for senior executivesand one for your implementation staff.
2. Assessment. Prior to an onsite evaluation,we collect data from your staff to providean initial comprehensive picture of yourorganization.
3. Creating an agile vision. We’ll help youcreate an end-state vision of your agileapproach, relating your core values to specific agile approaches.
4. Determining specific solution compo-nents. We’ll make methodologyrecommendations covering product devel-opment, project management, softwaredevelopment, and portfolio management.
5. Action plan. Together, we’ll set an actionplan that meets the objectives of your agileinitiative.
Cutter ConsortiumAccess to the Experts
Agile AssessmentAre you as good at Agile as you think youare? Where do you go next? Given the depthand breadth of Cutter’s Agile expertise, weare exceptionally skilled at performing bothqualitative and quantitative assessments. Atypical assessment includes the followingcomponents:
Interviews with team members, people inthe rest of the software value stream, thepeople who manage that value stream, andcustomers.
Short surveys or other tools for generatingquantitative data, to supplement the quali-tative information collected.
Review of any documents that the customermay provide.
From this information, we assess the “Agile-friendliness” of the client’s organization.Where are the opportunities for expandingAgile, or complementary techniques? Whatare the threats? We deliver this assessment ina presentation to the client, which includesmaterials for the client’s future reference.While this approach provides a starting pointfor any Agile assessment, we also tailor theassessment to fit the client’s organization andobjectives.
Technical Debt Assessmentand ValuationDo you really govern the software develop-ment process in your IT organization or do itsuncertainty and unpredictability leave youaghast? Is technical debt playing havoc withdeployment dates you commit to and keepingyour development staff from respondingquickly to customer requests? Do you knowhow much money is required to “pay back”your software’s technical debt?
The primary goals of this workshop are togive you a solid understanding of the natureof technical debt and how it impacts valuedelivery, and to familiarize you with stateof the art tools for measuring technical debt.You’ll also be introduced to a correspondinggovernance framework that ensures you canscientifically manage your software develop-ment process. Between the tools and theframework, you will be able to meaningfully
“x-ray” the software you are developing atthe desired granularity at any point in time.Moreover, you will be able to reduce a largenumber of complex technical considerationsto a common denominator that is easilyunderstood by your peers and superiors —the dollar amount required to pay back theaccrued technical debt.
Agile ManagementThough Agile practices are highly beneficialfor development teams and their organiza-tions, they place unique challenges onmanagement. Executives must bring theirbroad view of the business, including itsneeds, the competition, the pace of innova-tion, and product demand, to the task ofmanaging Agile development.
Cutter’s Senior Consultants are experts intraining management teams on how to bothmeet the needs of the Agile developmentorganization and pursue the strategic goals ofthe business. At the end of this two-day AgileManagement session, your executives andmanagers will know how to balance empow-erment with governance, align goals andmetrics up and down the organization, anddetermine the exact amount of agility (or stability!) your organization needs to supportits business objectives.
Software DevelopmentAnalyticsIn today’s fast-paced business climate, it takesconstant learning about your operation tocompete. Although improving your softwaredevelopment process will free up assets todevote to innovation, many of today’s realities— from framework wars to “one size fits all”methodologies — make it nearly impossibleto accurately estimate, plan, track, and governsoftware development work at the team, project, program and portfolio levels.
Cutter’s software development analytics consulting, led by Cutter Senior Consultant Dr.Murray Cantor, delivers real-time knowledgeabout your software development operationand the adjustments you can make to deliveroptimal business value — whether the goal isbetter financial outcomes, faster time to market, or operational efficiency. You’ll move
Consulting, Training & Exec Ed
Cutter Consortium consulting, training,
and executive education offerings are
developed and presented by its Senior
Consultants: you’ll benefit from cutting-
edge ideas, methods, and strategies
presented by the thought leaders who
developed them.
Cutter’s extensive offerings can be
customized to meet your organization’s
needs and ensure everyone shares
the same base knowledge and is well-
equipped to take on the challenges
of new ways of doing business.
Don MacIntyre
from the subjective analysis of your software development process to a quantitative one,from the “belief” that your software develop-ment methods are effective to anevidence-based understanding that enablesyou to measure progress and make modifica-tions where necessary. This program helpsyou assess your mix of software developmentefforts, determine your process debt, createactionable goals for achieving hoped-for outcomes, and employ measures and feed-back loops to set and track goals.
What Leaders Need to KnowAbout DevopsThere’s too much lead time between idea con-ception and production in many organizations,despite various project management method-ologies and the push towards operationalexcellence. Internal fights emerge asDevelopment and Operations strive towardsconflicting goals: Agile shortens softwaredelivery time by introducing a greater numberof smaller changes; ITIL increases stability byminimizing changes. How can an organizationovercome this internal conflict? With devops.
Devops looks to optimize the whole process.In this workshop, you’ll learn:
The history and drivers that have pushedforward the notion of devops
The translation of agile concepts withinthe traditional ITIL world
Where devops fits with existing conceptslike Scrum, Kanban, ALM
The role of tools such as virtualization,infrastructure as code, and monitoring
How to introduce devops withinexisting/new environments
Devops is not about tools, but about mindsetand trust. Technologies such as infrastructureas code, virtualization, monitoring and deploy-ment can play a crucial role in supporting thiscollaboration. Exploiting the “symmetry ofignorance” and moving beyond the traditionalboundaries inside organizations will make itpossible to collaborate more frequently toreach business goals.
Agile Analytics: Program andProject ManagementProper Agile project planning is a foundationof Agile Analytics. Agility calls for planning forwhat you know now and being prepared toadjust in the face of change. Agile Analyticsplanning is a highly collaborative process thatincludes long range DW/BI road mapping toestablish future vision, and short horizon planning of near term delivery projects. Thistwo-day course will walk you through program road mapping and project charteringsessions to introduce you to a set of effectivepractices for facilitating collaboration betweentechnical team members, end users, and management stakeholders. This course willshow you how to:
Charter an agile BI/DW project using theagile project management framework
Coordinate an effective and collaborativeprogram road mapping session
Use Innovation Games for ideation,convergence, and prioritization
Estimate and prioritize agile BI/DW projectsand features
Map features, epics and stories intoiterations and releases
Some of the topics you’ll discuss may include program road mapping, program inception,project chartering, sizing and prioritizing, projects and features, and story mapping.
Executive Overview of AgileAlthough Agile is a team-level methodology,the success of Agile often depends on execu-tive sponsorship. Executives usually havemany questions: How long does it take forAgile to start showing results? How do execu-tives best assess whether the Agile effort is ontrack? How deeply do executives need tounderstand Agile practices and principles?
This one-day workshop is designed to answerthese questions, and many others. Many Agiletransformation initiatives succeed because ofenlightened leadership from the executivewing. Many others fail because of executiveneglect. This workshop helps you ensure yourAgile teams receive the executive-level support they require.
Agile Beyond the TeamOriginal practitioners may have mixed andmatched from Scrum, XP, DSDM, and otherAgile flavors, but the set of practices and principles was more limited than it is today.What it means to be Agile today involves alarger menu of techniques, mixed in more varied combinations, and matched more precisely to challenges. Many of thesemethodologies go beyond the team, changingthe way the software value stream works.
This three-day workshop provides anoverview of the practices beyond the originalAgile core that are now common features ofAgile. Whether it’s Kanban, continuous integration, continuous delivery, story mapping, UX design, alternate estimation andplanning techniques, or scaled Agile, you’llreceive an overview of these and otherapproaches that now complement the traditional Agile core, and discuss how toselect among them when deciding which isthe next approach to adopt.
Getting Better CustomerInsights FasterThe last several years have been a time ofintense innovation around customer insights.Agilists have combined techniques from several disciplines, such as user experience(UX) design, software analytics, and evenresearch techniques borrowed from anthropology and psychology. They have alsoexpanded and honed elements of the Agiletoolkit, such as using user story mapping togenerate an initial backlog of user stories.
This workshop provides an introduction to allof these techniques. You’ll learn how to builda strategy around these techniques, increasingthe speed of collecting these insights, improv-ing their reliability, and lowering the cost ofacquiring them.
Agile: The BasicsWhatever the number of teams, the level ofAgile experience, or the type of project orproduct, our approach is the same: Get teamsto the Agile starting line as quickly as possible. We include many hands-on exercisesduring this three-day training, and we startimmediately defining, estimating, and prioritizing the backlog. We move quickly intorelease and sprint planning, so that when theworkshop is finished, your teams are as readyas possible to start.
Naturally, we offer follow-on coaching as well.In most cases, this workshop rolls immediatelyinto whatever additional backlog creation andplanning the team needs to get working assoon as possible.
Improve Measured BusinessPerformance with LeanHistory has shown that nobody can imposelasting change on an organization. But organicchange can become permanent. Throughtraining, advisement, and/or facilitation andcoaching, this workshop will lead your organi-zation through an approach that incrementallyweaves such change into your organization’sfabric, decreasing waste and increasing business performance.
Drawing up four major toolkits, Lean, Kanban,Complexity Management including Cynefin,and modern Systems Engineering, and thehighly effective Lean Startup experimentalapproach to value determination, you’ll discover a strategy that is different than the“cut waste” strategy of many American Leaninitiatives; this strategy reliably improvesvalue, flow and business results.
Leading Successful ProjectsMost of the fixed rules that governed projectsonly a few years ago have been thrown outthe window. Today a project needs to be runas a spry organism, nimble to the changes it’ssure to encounter. We think of ourselves assystems designers, but the project is a systemtoo, and do we ever turn our skills to properlydesigning it? All of the heuristics governingsystem design can profitably be applied todesign of the project, including design so thatsuccessful implementation is possible; designthat allows for ease of testing; defensivedesign that counteracts error and fault; iterative design; and design for ease of humanuse. Each of these heuristics is routinelyapplied to the design of software products.Now it’s time to apply them to designing software projects. The goal of this course, ledby Cutter Fellow Tim Lister, is to help yourprojects be more productive and better able toturn out quality results. You’ll be prepared fora leadership role in designing, populating, andinhabiting these adaptive project organisms,ensuring your project meets its challenges,and achieves its promise of success.
• Scott W. Ambler• Jurgen Appelo• Christopher M. Avery• Kent Beck• Tom Bragg• Alistair Cockburn• Jens Coldewey• Ward Cunningham• Patrick Debois• Esther Derby• Khaled El Emam• Hillel Glazer• Tom Grant• Sebastian Hassinger• John Heintz• Ron Jeffries• Peter Kaminski
• Mark Levison• Tim Lister• Alan MacCormack• Michael Mah• Sue McKinney• James Robertson• Suzanne Robertson• Alexandre Rodrigues• Dave Rooney• Johanna Rothman• Andrew Shafer • Hubert Smits • David Spann• Giancarlo Succi• James Sutton• Rob Thomsett• Lynn Winterboer• Robert K. Wysocki