agile transition

As agile continues to grow in popularity, more organizations are experiencing the frustration and pain that accompany attempts to move from traditional to agile practices. With that pain comes the awareness that organizational and cultural change is essential to an agile adoption strategy. Ade Shokoya shares proven approaches for “selling agile” to senior management, colleagues, and all business stakeholders. Ade offers up what he calls “stealth agile” as a catalyst for organizational change. You’ll learn about the three personality types essential to successful agile transformation initiatives and how to avoid the common agile mistake that could cost you your job and/or reputation. Take back a guide to determine the agile transformation strategy best suited to your organization’s size and culture.

Adopting agile is often a difficult proposition with many variables and sometimes uneven results. Recognizing when your adoption isn't working well and taking pro-active actions to put it back on track are essential. So, how do you know if your adoption is proceeding through rough but expected waters or running the risk of failing? Thomas Stiehm describes the signs of serious adoption problems and the steps you can take to fix them. Leveraging ten years of experience helping teams adopt agile, Tom walks through the many successes and failures he’s seen and, more importantly, the mistakes companies and people made that led to those failures. Learn the remediation steps you can take to re-energize and re-center your adoption efforts. Don’t let small missteps cascade into failure. Instead, join in and take back an action plan that’s sure to increase the odds of making your agile adoption a win for you, your teams, and your company.

Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and compete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, lean, Kanban, or the ways of the emerging Lean Start Up crowd. Rather than stumbling down one path or another, join David Hussman as he shares tools for assessing and designing an agile process with practices that address your specific needs and constraints. David starts by teaching a simple assessment process to help you understand where you are today. Then, he offers ideas for selecting a meaningful set of practices and moves on to teach you how to create a meaningful and measurable coaching plan. David covers the selection of product planning tools, iterative delivery tools, tracking tools, and more. If you want to clear the fog about which agile practice will really help you, come for some answers. Even if you don’t yet know what questions to ask, David can help.

Organizational transformation is difficult work. Many agile transformation efforts begin with lofty goals only to be sabotaged by unrealistic expectations about the depth and complexity of the changes required. Often, resistance to change is ingrained in an organization’s value system and difficult to overcome. Tamara Runyon presents an overview of a new Agile Transformation Competency Framework-a strategic tool for evaluating and guiding your transformation efforts. Evaluating the organization against the dimensions of the framework-collaboration, agile engineering, product management, environment, organizational culture, and distributed teams-results in a transformation plan that avoids setting unachievable expectations. To institutionalize agile values within an organization and lay the foundation for wide-scale adoption, a company must align with these six competency areas.