Project management remains an important part of an Agile organization, even more so for large scale and enterprise projects. Teams in these environments must coordinate distributed teams, align multiple product owners, and meet the needs of other organizational stakeholders such as finance and functional managers. Project managers in these situations frequently find themselves torn between two worlds as they must support an Agile team in an organization with a significant amount of complexity.
On this stage we will discuss the state of project management in an Agile environment, and how Agile and traditional project management methods are merging to create more effective organizations.
Planning is important yet many teams view planning as something to avoid and many companies use plans as weapons against their teams. In this session you’ll learn how to break that cycle with skills that create useful plans that lead to reliable decisions. After mastering the basic concepts, we will progress quickly to planning under complex situations including how to estimate velocity without historical data, how to estimate velocity when team size is changing, and how to create confidence intervals so we can create plans we are 90% confident in, even on fixed-price or fixed-date contracts
| Presenter(s): | Mike Cohn |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 13:30 - 17:00  |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Expert |
Traditional Scrum burndowns are based on single point estimates of how long a task will take. However, single point estimates are inherently faulty and inaccurate, and they encourage underestimation. Learn how to incorporate range based estimation techniques into your Scrum burndown, and better communicate to your boss or clients what a project is really going to take. Arin will back up this thesis with academic and industry research, real world examples, and an engaging presentation style. Participants will leave with concrete tips & templates for using range estimates in their projects.
| Presenter(s): | Arin Sime |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
You may have heard that Scrum and Kanban are mutually exclusive or that Kanban isn't good for large software projects. In fact, much as Scrum and XP play well together, so do Scrum and Kanban. This session is for folks that are already doing Scrum and are curious about Kanban. It will show how the Lean practice of “One Piece Flow” is the key to both, and look at how to mix and match Scrum and Kanban to fine tune a process that fits your circumstances. This will include: decoupling once-per iteration activities from the iteration, work-in-progress limits, and the concept of “pull.”
| Presenter(s): | Damon Poole |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Many people think that agile development is for open-ended, ambiguously-defined, projects – but not for fixed-price, fixed-time, fixed-feature ones. Nothing could be further from the truth! I have seen successful agile fixed-price contracts for over 25 years, and believe that agility is _required_ for fixed-price to succeed. I have learned many lessons: some of them bad, most of them good. In this talk I present some guidance about how to do these projects successfully: how the organization works in an agile way; how to develop a strategy for the project; and how to monitor its progress.
| Presenter(s): | Dan Rawsthorne |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Introductory |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
In this 60 minute presentation, we will provide a 360 degree view of Agile and how it relates to the classic project manager role. We will discuss the flavors of Agile, how to pick and choose practices from the flavors, and how to create an Agile lifecycle that thrives within a specific company and environment. We will look at the overall Project Management lifecycle and where Agile fits in. We will also discuss the Scrum Master role and how it can be done in parallel with classic PM work. This presentation has been presented to over 1000 project managers to superb reviews.
| Presenter(s): | Greg Smith |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere III |
| Level: | Introductory |
Agile is often traditionally associated as being exclusively applicable to the field of software development. However, non-software development projects can take ownership and use agile values, principles and practices to great effect. In this session, I will offer some approaches, techniques and examples for introducing agile into parts of the organisation that traditionally may not have considered it such as central services like finance, HR, marketing, traditional business areas as well as other areas of IT like infrastructure and provide some real-life examples along the way.
| Presenter(s): | Craig Smith |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Fixed price contracts written before a project starts lock in a fixed set of deliverables. Agile processes allow the customer to change his mind about those deliverables. In this report, we will describe how our project copes with this dissonance, including how we estimate project scope and write statements of work to allow the flexibility of change. We will also show how we manage the project through the life of the contract to meet real customer needs and the letter of the contract. The session will end with a demonstration of our project estimation process followed by a group discussion.
| Presenter(s): | Mark Balbes |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Like many IT organizations in state government agencies, NY's Dept. of Transportation primarily used Waterfall. I implemented the agency's first agile projects. I was challenged by the agency's unique environment, learned lessons, discovered systemic problems, overcame organizational obstacles and changed misconceptions. I will discuss what I've learned during this award-winning project and make recommendations for others in bureaucratic companies and agencies. DOT's projects are moving to agile/scrum and the institution's IT group is incorporating agile into its PM and SDLC methodologies.
| Presenter(s): | Pat Guariglia, PMP, CSP |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality to release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or, where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? Program management is the art of coordinating several sub-projects to a common objective. Until the parts are assembled into the whole, the parts have no value to the organization. Agile approaches help manage risk for projects, and can scale to programs. We'll experience risk and coordination as a program.
| Presenter(s): | Johanna Rothman |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
With its growing popularity, Scrum is being applied in a number of large and complex organizations. Many of these face challenges leading to the situation where Scrum faces the temptation of "institutionalization". It is changed, tempered, or adjusted. Perhaps as a temporary measure, or simply to align Scrum with other processes, or as an adjustment for the circumstance. What are the trade-offs when Scrum, a trans-formative process becomes part of the institution? Join to facilitators who will argue the pros and cons of this situation and invite the audience to participate in the discussion.
| Presenter(s): | Brian Bozzuto , Michele Sliger |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Asia 2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Travel budgets are under pressure. Traditional 2d collaboration tools help, but may not engage our minds or convey as much information as 3d virtual worlds. Many companies, universities, and government bodies are using virtual worlds for collaboration. But what are the pitfalls? This talk shows how 3d tools were used to save 76% of event costs, as well as how to conduct Scrum in 3d.
| Presenter(s): | William Krebs |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
In order to foster trust and credibility between a project team and its stakeholders, the team has the responsibility to clearly communicate the health of the project. As the leaders of a project, we can apply the metaphor of medical care and their use of "vital signs" to help form a holistic view of the state of the project. Come learn the five "Project Vital Signs", their associated quantitative metrics and how to enable a team to effectively use them as a tool to diagnose and treat project health problems.
| Presenter(s): | Stelios Pantazopoulos |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
This experience report is about how “agile” projects that are poorly implemented can turn into a worse nightmare than old traditional projects. This fixed-price project had lots of customer feedback and changes. Scope creep was evident but “Agile says be open to feedback.” The project started losing lots of money and it was barely halfway done. The project illustrates a great account of how literal and immature implementations of Agile may lead a project to failure and how management can turn things around by the proper adoption of agile practices.
| Presenter(s): | Ahmed Sidky , Sara Medhat |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Estimation is associated with Fear, Uncertainty and Deathmarches. Most of us would rather not estimate. Yet, sometimes we *do* need estimates and commitments, even on "estimation-less" projects. Play a series of estimation games to experience how different techniques deliver *very* different results. Learn a few simple rules that turn you into a reliable estimator. But correct estimates aren't enough. See what else is required to deliver on your promises. Learn to deal with the destructive games people play with estimates. Estimating can be Fun, embracing Uncertainty and Delivering.
| Presenter(s): | Pascal Van Cauwenberghe |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Introductory |
Too often teams simply dive into Agile projects—allowing the iterative and emergent nature of agility to guide them through the project. Sometimes this works well, often it can fail because you’re not well “Connected” to the “Business”. This sessions examines how to consistently get your Agile projects off to a strong beginning. We’ll explore how to create a project charter to guide your agile project; the keys to forming a solid agile team; and how to create a plan that allows your stakeholders to understand where you’re going.
| Presenter(s): | Bob Galen |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 5 |
| Level: | Practicing |
