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APLN Houston Chapter Meeting - February 18, 2010 - 6:00pm

The Agile PMO: Scaling Agile through Adaptive Governance

How should we scale Agile methods beyond individual projects? How can PMOs avoid being process police and instead truly support Agile teams, enable enterprise rollout of Agile methods, and sustain long-term Agile adoption? Learn how industry leaders are scaling Agile with Agile PMOs that:

Support and empower agile teams through training, coaching, and organizational obstacle removal
Track project portfolios using Agile tracking techniques
Bring lean discipline to project prioritization
Move towards a stable teams model of resource management

Sanjiv will share principles and techniques for the Agile PMO, and discuss how those concepts are being applied in the industry to scale Agile methods through adaptive governance of programs and portfolios.

Sanjiv Augustine

Sanjiv Augustine is the President of LitheSpeed, an innovative Agile and Lean training, consulting and coaching company; and an industry-leading Agile and Lean expert. For over 10 years, Sanjiv has assisted several leading clients adopt Agile methods, including Nationwide Insurance, Capital One, CNBC, Cornell University, NBC Universal, Sprint Nextel, The Motley Fool, T. Rowe Price and StreamSage. He is the author of several publications including Transitioning to Agile Project Management: A Roadmap for the Perplexed, The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery and the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005); and the founder and moderator of the Yahoo! Agile Project Management discussion group. Sanjiv is also a founder and advisory board member of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) ’s Agile Community of Practice. He presents regularly at several Agile and PMI user groups and conferences worldwide; and project management conferences including Project World and Project Summit. As an in-the-trenches practitioner, he has personally managed Agile projects varying in size from five to over one hundred people, trained thousands of agile practitioners via public classes and conference presentations, and coached numerous project teams.

Sponsorships

Door Prizes!

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You must pre-register and be present to win.
A minimum of 45 people must attend to award the door prize.

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Food and Refreshments!

Would you like to donate food and refreshments for this event?

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Please join us in thanking Sysco for their generous support in
hosting tonight's meeting.

1390 Enclave Parkway - Houston, Texas - 281-584-1390

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PMPs may file for 1 PDU under Continuing Certification Requirements’ “Category 4: Other Providers.”

APLN Houston Chapter Meeting - January 21, 2010 - 6:00pm

Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Rethinking Performance Measures for Agile Development

A recent Business Week article proclaimed, “There is no more Normal.” With businesses in the throes of pervasive change, the traditional emphasis on “following the plan with minimal changes” must be supplanted by “adapting the plan to inevitable changes.” If agile development practices are about focusing on and delivering customer value, then how can adherence to traditional scope, schedule, and cost be a good way to measure performance? It can’t. Jim Highsmith explains the need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to instead focus agile software development success on value, quality, and constraints. Even today, many agile teams are asked to be flexible and adaptive and then are told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals. They are asked to adapt—inside a very small box. If we are to truly bring agile values to our organizations, then we must change our performance measures. To paraphrase the Agile Manifesto, it’s not that scope, schedule, and cost are unimportant but that value and quality are more important. Jim explores the rationale behind moving to this new set of agile performance measures.

Evangelizing Agile Inside YOUR Company

Presentation Available

Join Roy Carnes as he shares some experiences along with valuable techniques for communicating the business value of Agile and how to help gain and strengthen support for it inside your company. Over the past 8 years, OutSystems has worked with organizations around the world to introduce and implement Agile practices –and directly involved in the delivery of over 500 Agile projects.

In this presentation Roy will share some of OutSystems best practices and lessons learned about:

Gaining business sponsorship.
Building trust with customers (end-users).
Dealing with other non-Agile teams.

Joint Meeting with the West Side PMI Houston group!

“Oracles” and “Moles”: How to Manage Key Performers Across the Knowing-Doing Gap

Presentation Available:

In the 21st century, organizations succeed or fail on the strength of two currencies: (1) information and knowledge, and (2) proper execution to deliver results. In many organizations individuals sometimes morph (in simplest terms) into those who are either: information-focused (to the neglect of timely execution) -“Oracles”, or execution-focused (to the neglect of the bigger-picture) – “Moles”. Join us to help you gain a clearer understanding of the Oracles and Moles in your organization and find ways to manage them effectively across the information and execution gaps.

Join APLN Houston for a Special Event at

Waste Management

1021 Main Street, Houston, Texas, 77002

Agile Estimating and Planning for Scrum

Agile Estimating and Planning techniques have become so widely used as part of Scrum that it would be inappropriate to consider Scrum without also considering these practices. Although many teams utilize these techniques, it would be helpful to understand the basic expectations of them within the Scrum framework. In this one-hour session, we'll focus on the following: