The speakers:
The talk “Cooking the Product Stew”.
Robin Dymond is a proven leader and innovator in training for Scrum, Agile, and Lean methods. He regularly achieves 100% increase in productivity of teams he trains and supports. These results are achieved by a deep understanding of Lean and Agile principles, team dynamics, and many Agile change experiences. Dymond developed Scrum, Lean, and Agile training for teams and trained hundreds of “new to Scrum” team members. At Agile 2008 Dymond co-presented an innovative new class for Scrum Product Owners that lead many to re-think their role and how business value is achieved.A frequent speaker and organizer in the Agile community, Dymond co-organized and facilitated both the APLN National Leadership summit and the Agile Executive Consortium in 2007. He is a co-founder and board member of APLN Richmond, organizing Agile events. Dymond was assistant producer of Learning and Education stage at Agile 2008. This year Robin is a producer of the main stage at Agile 2009.
Dymond was a key member of a team that led the largest enterprise adoption of Scrum in financial services to date. This lean/agile initiative resulted in a time-to-market reduction of over 40% and process execution time savings of 70%. He worked as trainer and mentor to teams, coaches, and management for over 20 teams.
In 2002 2003 He lead the first large enterprise application development that used Agile and Microsoft .NET in Canada. Since then Dymond implemented Agile in service of multi-national retail companies, startups, and Fortune 500 clients.
I am working within Healthcare IT for over 13 years, starting out as a service engineer (installations, upgrades, bug fixing & integration development) which is one of the better ways to customer driven development. From there on we went to software engineer, team lead, group lead to production manager, isn’t this typical waterfall?
Anyway, back to the agile world … there we take up the role as Product Owner for 3 scrum teams as well as fulfilling the role of Scrum Coach within a 4 headed scrum coaching or rather scrum help desk team. As I see things I have been working Agile since … always but only started to tune it to a real proven implementation (Scrum) since beginning 2007. During this process we are trying to lower the typical waterfall pyramids in the organization as well as educate people outside the R&D organization like sales for example, a tough but rewarding quest.
Even though I was not intending to follow a certification course I did it anyway for the reasons that it was extended with a cooking event and it was given by Jeff Sutherland. I probably learned more during the cooking event than the course itself, especially from Jeff since he has a lot of experience within the Healthcare domain.
Visit Jurgen’s agilefun.com
The talk: “Cooking the Product Stew“
This is not a recipe. Most of the time a stew is made from various ingredients you have around, left overs, new ingredients that go together well, and others that are filling but not good unless there is lots of sauce. The enterprise software market is made up of products that are a stew of software on many legacy platforms that have evolved over a long period by many hands. Taking an enterprise software product to Agile methods is a challenge. There are technological, political, and organizational barriers. With distributed organizations we can add in cultural differences as well. In a uniquely European context, this presentation will draw from the ongoing experiences of multi-location multi-team enterprise product development effort with teams in 3 countries and 5 locations.
Ingredients include:
- very large tough customer with many needs and a strong tendency to waterfall
- 1 sales team that is not accountable in any way for the promises made
- 12 analysts trying to figure out what is needed and each is telling the teams what to do
- 1 PMO creating use cases on their own
- Remove 1 recently fired QA manager
- 26 teams in 5 locations across Europe
- 460 developers
- Top it off with a Chief Product Owner who has no direct line to the customer
Directions:
Mix ingredients well with confused priorities, then add large requirements docs whole
Strain through a tight budget
Process with high heat and pressure using the “do or die” setting.
Then add Agile and Scrum, simmer till over budget.
Our chefs will describe the interesting fun they are having with this product stew, and how they are working with all the cooks in the kitchen to make a more tasty product from the stew we have today.
