Thanks to Bill Cure and his colleagues at APICS Houston. Always a pleasure to talk with a new group about agile principles and values.

Presentation Available  (large file)

Self-Organizing Teams - Chaos or Triumph?

Thanks to Michael Steinberg and company for hosting another highly successful Houston Techfest event this past weekend. I was happy to be a small part of it to talk about the need for self-organizing teams and how team members can start taking steps to become more self-organizing to help their companies thrive.

Presentation Available (27mb file)

My thanks to Eric Bennett and the members of the PMI Clearlake-Galveston chapter for their hospitality and pizza! It was my pleasure to speak to the group about agile principles and practices: Agility - What's It All About?

 Presentation Available

Thanks to Jane Boucher and the conference committee for organizing another great PMI Houston Conference this year.  Also my thanks to agilists new and old for attending my two sessions and offering their thoughts and ideas on how to improve our teams and organizations.

Presentations available:

• Stairway to Agility - An Agile Adoption Path
• In Hindsight - The Art of Agile Retrospection
  

Many thanks to Allen Woodward and the gang at the PMI Coastal Bend chapter for their hospitality, Corpus Christi style.  I enjoyed meeting and talking with the group about agile principles and practices: Agility - What's It All About?

 Presentation Available

Thanks to Larry Bock, Steve Nunziata, and Dan Zucker for the opportunity to speak to the San Antonio Agile Interest Group.  It's great to see a another local community group come together to advance the cause.  This  presentation is another incarnation of Agility - What's It All About?  to provide a basic introduction to agile concepts and principles; striking one of my recurring themes - agility is more about behvaior than it is about practices.

Presentation

Thanks to Improving Enterprises and Microsoft for putting on a great event, it was an honor to participate.  The Agility - It's Advanced Citizenship presentation was a lot of fun to present.  The attendees had some great discussion around the problem scenarios and as always I learn a lot in the process as well.

Presentation   Problem Scenarios 

Always a pleasure to talk to more PMI Houston members about agile principles.  This presentation discussed the basic agile concepts and principles for the pre-meeting session at both the North and Galleria venues.

Presentation

Another great event this year that I was glad to be a part of.  The presentation focuses on the need to incorporate value generation in our project planning and demonstrates how the Innovation Game® Buy A Feature can help gain consensus of shared value amongst a group of stakeholders. 

Presentation Buy A Feature Exercuse Handout

I was pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the PM Roundtable group at MD Anderson Cancer Center.  The group shared some great thoughts and questions that started excellent discussions on agile concepts and their potential.  This also gave me the chance to update my introductory presentation with some new thoughts and include some additional content around agile principles and practices.

Presentation

An update to the PMIH agile planning presentation.  This one focuses more on incorporating value generation in our project planning and has an Innovation Game® Buy A Feature exercise to help gain consensus of shared value amongst a group of stakeholders.  Thanks to Bryan Campbell, Shravan Arra, and Barbara Brown for providing some great assistance by playing feature retailers for the game.  Take a look at the exercise results to see some interesting variations for our doggie day care.

Presentation  Buy A Feature Handout  Exercise Results

Accelerating Your Organization's Agile Adoption

As more organizations adopt Agile practices they want to rapidly extend these benefits across their enterprise. However, agile adoption is challenging and teams can often start regressing backwards in the 'J-curve' effect after a few iterations. Using a skills maturity framework, organizations can assess where they are and accelerate their agile adoption avoiding the costs associated with the 'J-curve' effect.

I was honored to be able to present this at Agile2010 with my colleague Bryan Campbell.  An extended time slot allowed us to cover more of the problem scenarios and our audience surfaced some great ideas on approaching them.  One group even created a new personae and scenario for us to consider!

Presentation Self-Assessment Problem Scenarios

A busy day for me at the PMI Houston annual conference this year.  My thanks to PMI Houston for inviting me to present the following three sessions in the Agile Project Management track. Also my congratulations to the conference team lead by Jane Boucher for another successful conference.

Accelerating Your Organization's Agile Adoption

My colleague Bryan Campbell and I continue to refine this presentation based on what we learn each time we present it. This incarnation includes an new name and a growing emphasis on break out groups discussing real world scenarios and thinking through how one's level of agile maturity will shape the approach to the scenario.  Next stop for this one is Agile2010 in August.

Presentation Self-Assessment Handout Problem Scenarios

Agile Planning: It's All Relative

How long with that take? What will that cost? What is that really worth? Although we get asked these questions all the time, answering them with absolute values is hard, rarely accurate as we would like, and sometimes even a little misleading.  Agile planning answers these questions is a different way respecting the fact that we often don’t know much about a project when we get asked these questions. Using a variant of the Wideband Delphi technique, agile planning incorporates expert opinion, analogy and disaggregation to assess the relative value to drive the project work we are taking on. Thanks to the PMO team at BMC Software and Lunch-N-Learn program coordinator Jose Martinez for allowing me a dry run of the planning poker exercise prior to the conference.

Presentation Planning Poker Exercise Handout

What's This Thing Called Agility?

This session continues to provide me new insight with each audience.  Coming at the end of the conference let me take more of a retrospective slant based on what participants of the Agile Project Management track had seen and heard over the two days of sessions.  The overriding message continues to be that adopting agile principles is more than just adopting a new set of practices.  To reach the full potential of agility, one must also adopt agile values and create an organizational culture that fosters the openness and trust needed for agile teams to truly succeed.

Presentation

What's This Thing Called Agility?

Adopting agile principles is more than just adopting a new set of practices.  To reach the full potential of agility, one must also adopt agile values and create an organizational culture that fosters the openness and trust needed for agile teams to truly succeed. This presentation as presented to the PMI Houston chapter's downtown venue continues to evoled as I get more feedback on what resonates and what remains a challenge. I learn more each time.

Presentation

Maturing Your Organization's Agile Adoption

Held in conjunction with the Agile Development Practices Conference, the APLN Leadership Summit provided another opportunity to collaborate with my friend and colleague  Bryan Campbell.  

You’ve started down an agile adoption path; teams are working from prioritized product backlogs; iteration goals are being set and achieved; and working software is created every day. Now what? As more organizations adopt agile practices, they are challenged by the time and effort it takes to develop and mature agile skills across an organization. Organizations and leaders need tools to help them guide the agile skills adoption process. Using the Seven Stages of Expertise model developed by Meilir Page-Jones, this presentation will help you understand where you are, determine where you want to go, and take actions to keep your teams progressing along the path toward agile maturity.  Also provided are a self-assessment guide and a set of problem scenarios to practice your skills.

• Presentation Slides:
• Self-Assessment:
• Problem Scenarios:

What's This Thing Called Agility?

The presentation continues to evolve as an introduction to agility focusing more on the values and organizational culture side of agile principles. This presentation looks at projects, teams and leadership required for success.

Maturing Your Organization's Agile Adoption

In collaboration with Bryan Campbell  this presentation uses the Seven Stages of Expertise model developed by Meilir Page-Jones to propose a framework that will help you understand where you are, where you want to get to, and the leadership required to keep your teams progressing in their development of agile skills. The presentation also defines some basic leadership guidelines and a number of real-world scenarios that test your skills.

Agile practices offer a reasoned way to address uncertainty and change in ever evolving business environments and steer the organization toward achieving the best possible outcome for its effort.  This presentation introduces agile practices using Scrum as example and looks at the makeup of agile teams and leadership they require.

Traditional project management methods often approach all projects in the same plan driven manner regardless of the level of uncertainty and change represented by the project.  As a result projects fail to meet their anticipated business objectives and overall confidence in the team's ability to deliver is lost.  Agile methods are becoming well established to address these issues in software development efforts, but agility is not just for software.  Agile methods like Scrum can be applied to any project effort that entails significant uncertainty to deliver improved business results in ever evolving business environments, and do so in a manner that demonstrates visible, predictable progress toward today's most important business priorities. Based on a real-life client experience, this presentation will show how Scrum can be used to manage a complex supply chain process and ensure that business objectives are met.

By focusing on business value, transparent collaboration and continuous improvement, agility provides alternative approaches and toolsets than can meet today's challenges.  Using Scrum as an example, this presentation will provide and introductory look at how agility can be applied to deliver improved business results in ever evolving business environments.

Meetings often tend to just spring up out of nowhere and accomplish nothing.  Here are some tips for planning and conducting productive meetings that accomplish real business goals.