Summary
In the last few years, we have seen a sharp rise in the number of companies attempting to transition to agile software development practices. For a variety of reasons, many agile transitions have failed, resulting in immediate chaos, infighting, and an exodus of top talent to insist their employers “don’t get it”. Your agile transition can work, but you need to pay attention to what your competitors have ignored: you must get to the heart of your organisation’s problems before you can begin to apply tools from the agile toolbox. Join J. B. Rainsberger, who has seen more than enough failure to know, to learn how to avoid your competitors’ mistakes and enjoy the kind of success that agile software development practices promise.
The course is right for you, if…
- You are involved in an agile transition that is showing signs of failure, or
- You are starting an agile transition and want to know what common mistakes to avoid, or
- You are an executive you knows your organisation needs to adopt agile practices, and who needs to maintain sufficient cash flow while your people learn, or
- You are a middle manager whose bosses say both “go agile” and “don’t be late”, or
- You are a project manager who feels anxious about how these new practices will affect your project’s schedule, or
- You are a manager whose people insist on doing things the old way, despite your attempts to entice them to try agile practices, or
- You are a technician who feels anxious about having permission to practise these new ways of working diligently, or
- You are a technician (programmer, tester, business analyst) who feels pressure to do the same old things that just don’t work
What you will learn…
- Why you need to apply agile techniques to the entire business, and not just the technical teams delivering features
- Why training (alone) probably won’t help
- How to evaluate an agile consultant
- How to avoid the typical destructive divisiveness that comes with adopting new practices
- The two archetypal and opposing reactions to uncertainty
- How to use the Theory of Constraints to guide your transition
- Which agile practices will actually hurt you right now
- How to use cost profiles to decide which agile practices fit you right now
What we will do
- Pinpoint your most pressing problems to obtain evidence about what needs to change now
- Use concepts from the Theory of Constraints to choose the area to improve, decide how to measure progress while we improve it, and know when we can safely stop improving it
- Practise asking questions without annoying those we question
- Turn your organisations and projects into case studies to apply immediately what you’ve learned
- Draft practice adoption proposals designed to achieve buy-in and commitment
