Agile Day 2010

1-day – 2 Tracks

The first Agile Day, held on September 15th, sold out with 120 participants.  We offered two tracks in the morning filled with experience reports for small/start-up’s (Silicon Alley track) and large organizations (Broadway track). During the afternoon we held an Open Space and closed with Panel. Below you will find the program overview and speaker bio’s from that conference day.

08.30am to 09.00am – Arrival, Registration, Refreshments

09.00am to 09.15am – Intro: Kick-Off! Welcome and Opening of the Agile Day 2010

09.15am to 10.00am – Keynote: Are We as Agile As We Think? by Christopher Avery

Silicon Alley Track (Agile Experiences in Small and Start-up Companies)

10.15am to 11.00am – Matt Raines (Bluefly) History of Scrum at Bluefly: Part I Slides

11.00am to 11.45am – Jeff Gothelf (The Ladders)Beyond Staggered Sprints Slides

11.45am to 12.30pm – Cara Lemon and Rochelle DiRe (LimeWire) The Value of Collaboration in Fostering Agility

Broadway Track (Agile Experiences in Large Enterprises)

10.15am to 11.00am – Gabino Roche (NYSE) and Jonathan Miller (S&P) Business Value-Driven Portfolio Management with Agile Slides

11.00am to 11.45am – Monica Kumar (Gerson Lehrman Group) Make me Agile – Expecting the unexpected! Slides

11.45am to 12.30pm – Adam Roberts (MTV Networks) Agility and Volatility

12.30pm to 01.30pm – Lunch (Served in Registration Area)

01.30pm to 03.30pm – Open Space Conference (Facilitator: Lane Halley)

At an open space event, people discuss things they care about with other people who share similar interests. An open space event promotes agile values of collaboration, conversation and self-organization. Open space events are used to surface common concerns, brainstorm solutions to a problem or simply to exchange information. At the start of the open space event, participants generate a list of potential conversation topics, choose what to talk about, organize into small groups, engage in conversation and then present their conclusions back to the larger group. The outcome of an open space event is a view into the ìhot topicsî that exist among your professional community, a chance to share your thoughts with peers, and learn what other people think. It’s also an excellent way to network and make new professional connections.

Conveners: Lyssa Adkins, Matt Ganis, Tiffany Lentz, Rob Purdie

03.30pm – 04.30pm – Outro: Panel Session moderated by Matt Ganis and Closing of the AGILE DAY 2010.

Jochen (Joe) Krebs is an agile coach, trainer, consultant and practitioner. In 2005, Joe founded Incrementor, a consulting company specialized in helping organizations with the successful adoption of agile processes (Scrum, XP, Lean and other iterative-incremental processes) either on a corporate enterprise-level or team-level. His programs are characterized by a unique blend of knowledge transfer with hands-on work. For example, in 2008/2009 he transformed AOL from waterfall to agile project management with Scrum which impacted the daily life of 3,000 employees around the globe.

Joe is the author of two books, Agile Portfolio Management and the RUP Reference and Certification Guide. He also published numerous articles in magazines about agile practices and processes. When time permits, he speaks at local chapter events as well as conferences. January 2007, he started AGILE NYC, the local user group of agile professionals in New York City, which is the organizer of this 1st Agile Day 2010.

Among the more outspoken, celebrated, and successful advisors on individual and shared responsibility in the workplace. Christopher Avery is an agile business mentor, the author of Teamwork Is An Individual Skill and hundreds of other articles, essays, and commentaries about productive relationships at work. Christopher consults to many of the world’s coolest corporations on the topics of responsible leadership, agility, and change. And he wants to make sure you expand your abilities as a leader everyday and develop cultures of ownership in your teams and organizations by applying the Leadership Gift in you.

Keynote: Are We as Agile As We Think?

Have you ever taken a good look at how we humans are wired from the viewpoint of complex adaptive systems? Paraphrasing Ken Schwaber, “Scrum doesn’t fix your problems. It exposes them.” Thus it is up to us to confront the problems ourselves, and we are all over the board in our ability to do that. Let’s expose and embrace our human defenses, coping mechanisms, and sources of resistance that keep us from learning, correcting, and improving.

And then let’s do something about it at the source. Get ready to access and master your innate Leadership Gift, and then introduce others to their Leadership Gift.

Since joining LimeWire in 2008 as the head of Human Resources, Rochelle DiRe has seen the company through a period of explosive change. Partnering with CEO George Searle and her progressive HR team, Rochelle has directed LimeWire’s transformation from a start-up to a mature company culture. She articulated and executed on a long-term organizational plan, which included the recruitment of LimeWire’s senior management team, 100% staff growth, and structure, processes and development programs that are in step with the company culture. She has continuously championed change initiatives that have allowed the company to scale and continue to prosper.

The Value of Collaboration in Fostering Agility

After ten years in business, the entire LimeWire development team adopted scrum in January 2010.

To make the transformation a success, an examination of our organizational habits was necessary. The resulting collaboration between our scrum and HR practices produced inspiring and far reaching results that allowed us to embrace constant change and energize our company in the face of dynamic external forces.

Jeff Gothelf is a user experience designer based in metro NYC. He has spent his career designing engaging experiences for clients big and small. He is currently the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com where he helps executive jobseekers and recruiters make meaningful connections with each other. Previously Jeff helped shape experiences at AOL, Webtrends and Fidelity Investments. Jeff publishes his thoughts on his blog and on Twitter as @jboogie.

Beyond Staggered Sprints: Agile user experience design teams in the real world.

When integrating design teams within an Agile framework, the general practice is one of staggered sprints keep the design team at least one sprint ahead of the dev team to ensure smooth transitions from sprint to sprint. Once put into practice however, the division of labor is never that clean. This presentation will cover how TheLadders.com product, technology and user experience teams successfully integrated an Agile framework into their process and evolved the “staggered sprints’ concept into a more holistic approach to UX/Agile success.

Monica Kumar is an IT professional with over 15 years of experience leading high performing technical and non-technical teams. She is currently Director of Project Management at Gerson Lehrman Group. She is a mentor, coach and trainer of Agile methodologies, processes and practices for her team of internal scrum coaches. She works closely with her colleagues to help enable the technology team to deliver enterprise capabilities that drive business.

Make me Agile – Expecting the unexpected!

In March 2009, GLG decided to embark on a journey to implement Agile (Scrum) in our Product and Engineering organizations comprised of ~150 individuals across our NY, Austin, Boston, India and Ireland offices. After rallying support for this transition from all executives and functional directors, we called in external coaches and started the quest to become Agile in earnest. We stuck to the textbook version as close as possible and adopted Scrum to its core. We also took some interesting decisions such as forming an Agile Leadership Team to champion the principles across multiple functions, planned coordinated monthly releases with cross-team release planning sessions and, instituted tools to support distributed teams. There have been some short term wins and there are some long term challenges which we continue to work on.

As we continue to inspect and adapt our processes, our belief in Agile and the principles behind it stands strong.

In this presentation, I will cover our impetus, journey, our metrics and how weíve matured as an agile organization over the period. Majority of the time will be spent discussing unexpected challenges we came across while scaling and sharing solutions weíve put in place. I will share many tips with those who are in early/mid stages of adoption.

As Scrum Master at LimeWire, Cara Lemon leads the process improvement effort for eight agile teams. She joined the company in 2008 with an initial focus in quality assurance. When LimeWire decided to go agile in January 2010, she stepped into the newly created Scrum Master role. Since that time she has championed a scrum adoption uniquely suited to LimeWire at both the team and project levels. Cara holds a degree in Anthropology from Brandeis University and has found that the study of human behavior has many interesting applications in agile software development.

The Value of Collaboration in Fostering Agility

After ten years in business, the entire LimeWire development team adopted scrum in January 2010.

To make the transformation a success, an examination of our organizational habits was necessary. The resulting collaboration between our scrum and HR practices produced inspiring and far reaching results that allowed us to embrace constant change and energize our company in the face of dynamic external forces.

Jonathan Miller is a business-technology executive and entrepreneur who has spent over twenty years in information technology. In the early 1990s, Mr. Miller helped create Advanced Network & Services, the major national Internet Service Provider start-up that pioneered the commercialization and privatization of the Internet. In 1995, Miller cofounded iClick, the first developer of web-based self-service applications for Human Resources. iClick streamlined the administration of essential HR and benefits services to employees and managers over corporate intranets. As COO and a Director of iClick, he raised two rounds of venture capital, and built and managed iClickís software development and technology operations. He also played an integral role in sales and promoted the companyís image through frequent speaking engagements in the HR technology industry. In 2000, iClick merged with Consumer Financial Network, later to become ProAct Technologies, where Mr. Miller served as Executive Vice President and CTO. Jonathan Miller is currently CTO for the Equity Research Services business unit of Standard & Poorís, a McGraw-Hill company. He holds an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a B.A. degree in Physics from Hamilton College.

Business Value-Driven Portfolio Management with Agile

Practicing Agile can lead to lean and high performing teams, but how does that translate at the portfolio or organizational-wide level? In the financial services industry most projects are measured by their return on investment. Business value in the form of increased revenue and/or cost savings and efficiencies are key metrics desired by senior management. At NYSE Euronext and at Standard & Poor’s we’ve experimented with models for leveraging such metrics on the foundation of Agile practices. In this presentation we will share our evolving model of Agile portfolio management and the measurement of business value leveraged at NYSE Euronext and at Standard & Poor’s.

Matt Raines is Vice President of Technology for Bluefly, the leading online retailer of designer brands, fashion trends and superior value. He joined the company in May, 2002 as Director of System Operations. He is currently responsible for all areas relating to Information Technology, including Application Development, Quality Assurance, Project Management, Site Operations, Data Warehousing and Information Systems. He led two eCommerce platform implementation projects, the most recent being the migration to ATG. He has been a catalyst for change within the organization including leading the transformative effort of moving to an Agile software methodology.

Prior to joining Bluefly, Matt served as the Director of Site Operations for Bigstep.com, and Internet start-up company focused on serving eCommerce enabled websites for small businesses. Matt shares his thoughts on Twitter at @matthewraines.

History of Scrum at Bluefly: Part I

Bluefly management made a pivotal decision in late 2006 to leave the current waterfall project management system behind and migrate to Scrum. The initial rollout was fought by team and short-term result was less than stellar but everyone kept pressing on Ö because management was the driving force. Along the way we incorporated all of the operations teams and most recently added outsourcing to the mix. Itís been wild ride over these last 3 ∏ years. Come hear the good, the bad and the ugly but mostly our lessons learned along the way.

Adam Roberts is a Senior PMO Director at MTV Networks. He started his love of all things digital with his first computer, a Commodore VIC20 which he still owns. Educated in broadcasting and cinematic arts, his blazingly short career in local television was followed by 6 years at Electronic Data Systems as a Business Analyst and Systems Engineer. Riding the swell of the World Wide Web, Adam held different development and management positions in digital media and online games companies until the great bubble-burst landed him at KPMG Consulting in New Zealand in 2001. There he undertook his first agile project developing a content management system and web portal using principles of Extreme Programming. He spent the next four years traveling the world leading agile projects until taking a brief respite as a freelance video editor in Burbank, CA. He joined MTV Networks in late 2006.

Agility and Volatility: Agile Transformation at MTV Networks

The media industry is notoriously mercurial, and MTV Networks is no exception. In March 2008, the core software development group embarked upon an ambitious journey of wide-scale agile adoption during a tumultuous time. This is the story of how we did it, what we did right, lessons learned, and how far we still have to go.

Gabino Roche is a technologist with fourteen years experience in global IT environments at start-ups and F500 companies. During the deregulation of the telecommunication industry in the late 1990s, while at AT&T he helped in the system design of integrating disparate order taking systems to streamline their new bundled telecommunication offerings: local, long-distance, internet, and wireless. In 2000, Gabino joined the start-up Aluminium.com where they established one of the first online B2B auctions for non-ferrous metal contracts based on the London Commodities Market Exchange. In 2004, while at UPS, he led a two year business strategy to overhaul payroll/expensing processes for UPS’ Feeder operations, producing a minimal cost savings of $3 million per annum by designing a system with homogenous work activity tracking and tax management. Also a former member at McKinsey & Company, he currently works as the Managing Director of Application Development at NYSE Euronext. Gabino has practiced Agile for over four years with co-located and globally distributed teams. As a presenter at the Agile 2009 conference, he shared his experiences with organizational Agile adoption. Gabino holds an MBA in Global Management from the University of Phoenix and a B.S. in Management Information Systems from Seton Hall University.

Business Value-Driven Portfolio Management with Agile

Practicing Agile can lead to lean and high performing teams, but how does that translate at the portfolio or organizational-wide level? In the financial services industry most projects are measured by their return on investment. Business value in the form of increased revenue and/or cost savings and efficiencies are key metrics desired by senior management. At NYSE Euronext and at Standard & Poor’s we’ve experimented with models for leveraging such metrics on the foundation of Agile practices. In this presentation we will share our evolving model of Agile portfolio management and the measurement of business value leveraged at NYSE Euronext and at Standard & Poor’s.

Lane Halley is an Interaction Designer and agile/user experience coach based in Manhattan. She gained teaching and facilitation experience as a Principal Designer at Cooper in San Francisco, CA and has contributed to successful software projects at both startup and enterprise companies. Lane is an active member of the agile community, serving as co-chair of User Experience stage at the Agile Alliance Agile 2009 conference and participating in open space Agile events on the East and West coasts. Lane is also an organizer of the Agile Experience Design Meetup in NYC. Lane shares her thoughts on her blog and on Twitter as @thinknow.

At an open space event, people discuss things they care about with other people who share similar interests. An open space event promotes agile values of collaboration, conversation and self-organization. Open space events are used to surface common concerns, brainstorm solutions to a problem or simply to exchange information. At the start of the open space event, participants generate a list of potential conversation topics, choose what to talk about, organize into small groups, engage in conversation and then present their conclusions back to the larger group. The outcome of an open space event is a view into the ìhot topicsî that exist among your professional community, a chance to share your thoughts with peers, and learn what other people think. It’s also an excellent way to network and make new professional connections.

Lyssa Adkins has taught Scrum to hundreds of students, coached many agile teams and served as master coach to many apprentice coaches since 2004. Coaching coaches one-on-one and in small groups, she enjoys a front-row seat as remarkable agile coaches emerge and go on to entice the very best from the teams they coach. Prior to agile, Adkins had more than fifteen years of expertise leading project teams and groups of project managers in large and small consulting firms, commercial software companies, and the Fortune 500, yet nothing prepared her for the power of Agile done simply and well. She is the author of the new headbook Coaching Agile Teams.

Matthew Ganis is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and ibm.com site architect. Matt was was co-founder of the Agile@IBM Community and was an early adopter of agile within IBM. He currently teaches Disciplined Agile Development and has published numerous articles and papers on the use of agile methods within ibm.comóboth within its traditional web development and the development/support of their Second Life Island. Matt has been the co-chair and chair of the Academy of Technologyís Agile Conferences for the past two years and is a Certified Scrum- Master and Practitioner. Outside of IBM, Matt serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Agile and Extreme Software Development and is a steering committee member of Agile NYC and co-organizer of this AGILE DAY 2010. He co-authored A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum published by IBM Press in July 2010.

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager’s job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

Rob Purdie is a Scrum coach, management consultant, facilitator and trainer. He is the Scrum Practice Leader at The Economist and the organizer of the NYC Scrum User Group. Rob has trained organizations to manage software development projects in Canada, the US, the UK, throughout Europe, in Africa and in South America.