Pre-Conference Workshops
(29 April 2007)

Creating an Agile Enterprise

Facilitator: Jim Highsmith

Implementing agile project management and development for a project team has nearly become routine — many companies have had very successful agile projects. However, one or two or four successful agile projects does not make a successful Agile Enterprise. From project governance to production support to project management issues, failing to recognize and address any of these integration issues can impede an organization with successful agile projects from becoming a successful Agile Enterprise. In this half-day tutorial, Cutter Consortium's Jim Highsmith will address how you can create an Agile Enterprise by looking at all the enterprise and organizational issues that must be addressed for agile practices and principles to become fully integrated into an organization's ways of doing business -- that is, "agile integration".

Through a combination of presentation and participant discussion, Jim Highsmith focuses this tutorial on the six key areas in which agile concepts and practices must be integrated into the enterprise: organization, process, culture, governance, alignment, and performance. Jim will not only define each of these six categories, but he'll also explain why integrating them throughout the organization is so critical to achieving the Agile Enterprise, and he'll provide advice on techniques you can use to change attitudes and lead the way to achieving a truly Agile Enterprise.

After spending the morning with Jim Highsmith, you'll possess a clear understanding of what's involved with integrating agile throughout your organization, including:

Organization: Discover the six organizing guidelines for building agile teams and agile organizations and understand how individual skills, abilities, foibles, and politics influence your organizational structure.

Process: From existing organizational processes associated with software development, to processes for interacting with client departments or customers, to finance and accounting processes, and to legal and contracting processes that have evolved to support waterfall methods, iterative development causes ripples —even waves or tsunamis! Learn how to create expectations that will ease the pain people in these departments, as well as for those involved with hiring and performance evaluation processes, architectural and design reviews, data base logical and physical design, and standardization, experience when integrating agile. Discover how to avoid letting "old" processes get in the way of adopting agile methodologies. And understand and mitigate the impact agile has on multiple project management strategies for different project types, distributed teams, outsourcing, and offshoring.

Culture: Highly collaborative teams (mostly synonymous with self-organizing) are not leaderless team -- leaders are still important. Discover why, in addition to having a good adaptive leader, high interaction, collaboration, and participatory decision making are all important to building organic teams and how to weave this kind of team into the fabric of your enterprise.

Governance: From a project perspective, governance relates to making sure that monies spent provide the benefits and returns that were projected. While an individual project here and there may go awry, an organization's portfolio of projects should be monitored to ensure that expenditures produce results. In this tutorial, you'll discover why governance systems and mechanisms devised during the era of serial or waterfall development processes are ineffective in the Agile Enterprise. Learn the importance of risk assessments that accurately predict ROI probability, the risk of cost overruns, and the risk of a project not delivering appropriate functionality.

Alignment: The emphasis of agile projects on small-chunk iterative development, delivering increments of customer value, collaboration, and self-organizing teamwork have an impact on both business strategy and enterprise architecture -- and visa versa. Discover how your agile development organization can produce quick feedback into both business and architectural strategies and how this enables those groups to evolve more effectively. Jim Highsmith will delve into these aspects of alignment and demonstrate how this integration area can also support greater business and architectural flexibility.

Performance: If your enterprise is to ultimately gain the benefits of agile development, if it is to ultimately grow to be a truly agile, innovative organization, then it must alter its performance management systems. Discover why current performance management "systems" that lead managers and others into valuing conformance-to-plan while often delivering scant business value will seriously impede agility in both projects and the entire enterprise, and learn how to separate the project performance management system from the team performance management system and alter our obsession with time to that of an obsession for customer value.

Don't miss this opportunity to take the next step in your organization's progression toward the Agile Enterprise. With the information and advice you glean from Jim Highsmith, you'll be prepared to begin down the path of agile integration.

Mastering the Art of Influence for IT Leaders: The Key to Long Term Success

Facilitators: Sheleen Quish and Frank Mallinder

In a perfect world, your success would be measured by the technical skill you and your team members possess. But survey after survey has concluded that IT executives need to improve their communication skills. In our imperfect, highly competitive world, business-IT success is more often linked to your ability to influence those who are seeking or using your services. "Publish or perish" in academia has an IT corollary -- "communicate or perish!"

To truly succeed, you must be able help others recognize the value of what you do. In this half-day pre-Summit workshop, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant and "CIO-at-large" Sheleen Quish and Executive Coach Frank Mallinder will guide you through mastering the art of influence.

You will learn:

• The difference between influence and manipulation
• How to ask the powerful questions that lead to better solutions
• How to prepare for important presentations where you are expected to "influence" the outcome
• How to present your recommendations in a powerful way

The workshop will examine the importance of developing your own style of influence from both the CIO and coach's perspective, and will emphasize learning through a series of interactive exercises. You’ll return to your organization equipped with an enhanced ability to influence and win people over through new skills and techniques.

Looking For and Developing Agile Management Behaviors

Facilitator: David Spann

Imagine your HR director or CTO asking you for help in writing a job announcement for one of the management/lead positions on your agile team. You understand the candidate needs to have familiarity with the specific technology your company uses, but beyond that, what defines the "right" person? How should this person act? What should he or she do (and not do)? What types of behaviors would make one person a success and another an out-and-out failure -- even if both understood the technology and had been "successful" in a previous job?

In this half-day workshop, you'll discover what behaviors are present in successful agile managers, how to identify who possesses those behaviors, and how to cultivate them in others so they can successfully manage and lead agile initiatives, and -- if that individual is you -- what behaviors you need to focus on to improve your effectiveness.

Through extensive research, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant David Spann has developed a list of eight distinct and definable managerial/leader characteristics that should be expected of successful agile management:

1. Innovative
2. Strategic
3. Excitement
4. Tactical
5. Communication
6. Delegation
7. Production
8. Consensual

You will learn the definition of each of these eight behaviors and how they impact the success of an agile leader. You'll also understand the potential liabilities -- and how to moderate them -- that may come with each of these behaviors. You'll discover specific actions you can use to measure a person's ability within each behavior. You'll even build sample job announcements that might attract the type of person your organization needs in such a role. And, you'll get tips on using those behaviors, as well as David Spann's Leadership 360 approach, to develop future agile managers within your organization.

As a result of this workshop you'll know:

• the measures you can use to judge whether an individual will feel comfortable in the role of agile manager
• how to identify individuals within your organization who have the potential to be successful agile leaders
• which behaviors need to be further developed/moderated in your current agile managers and/or candidates
• how to create job descriptions and hiring announcements that are compelling enough to entice the right candidates
• how to set up a personal development plan that helps fill the gaps

There is an implied assumption in most of the agile methodologies that anyone can do this work if they just understand and apply the principles and practices. But that's like telling someone to "work smarter, not harder" without helping them understand what it takes to be smarter. Don't miss this opportunity to join David Spann and discover just what it does take to be smarter!

Register now!