Creating an Agile Enterprise

Leader: Jim Highsmith, Director, Agile Project Management Practice

Length of workshop: 1 day

General Overview: 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 one-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 your 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 your 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 your 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.

Workshop Goals: This workshop will provide you and your team with 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 teams -- 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.

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.