Executive Briefing for Agile Leaders

Executive Briefing for Agile Leaders

Course Information:

1-day event: Date and location TBD, Portland, OR metro area

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Instructors

Johanna Rothman

Johanna works with companies to improve how they manage their product development—to maximize management and technical staff productivity and to improve product quality. She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development…

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Overview

You’ve heard it can help you go faster, or cheaper. Maybe your people have told you it’s time to go Agile. Maybe you know something about it and you’ve decided it’s time. But what does that mean? What will Agile buy you?

Agile allows you to see your projects as they proceed through demos and data. Agile is an empirical approach to projects, not a plan-driven approach to projects. Agile uses the data from the just-completed work to predict the next small chunk of work, and better the team’s estimation as they proceed, so they can explain to you what they will complete when.

With Agile, you can reflect the corporate strategy continually in the project portfolio. Just as Agile demands and provides transparency for the technical staff, it demands and provides transparency for management.
In this experiential workshop, Johanna Rothman will help you see the advantages and benefits of transitioning to Agile. You will leave with an understanding of what it means to deliver business value in an Agile way, the kinds of challenges your technical teams will face, and how you as managers will need to support them, and what you as managers need to do to change the organization.

Intended Audience

CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, Directors, Managers, project managers, business stakeholders and anyone supporting or managing Agile teams.

Learning Outcomes

You will see how Agile changes the organization and how you can help the cultural changes needed to make agile take hold. You will have the basic skills and knowledge to help your organization successfully transition to agile.

Content

  1. Introduction
    1. Elicit your specific problems and interests now
  2. Project 1 and debrief. We will simulate an Agile organization with multiple projects and teams.
  3. Discussion: The role of the manager in the Agile organization
    1. Leading the agile organization
      1. Building organizational capacity
      2. Removing systemic obstacles
      3. What your agile teams need from you
    2. Managing the project portfolio
      1. How to evaluate projects to know whether to commit to them
      2. Evaluating project backlogs to see where there is still value in continuing the project or stopping the project for now
      3. Reviewing the project portfolio to see if reflects the corporate strategy
      4. How Agile allows you to make sure the project portfolio reflects the strategy—especially important in a young company or a company going through a major transition
    3. What managers do in agile organizations and how they do it
      1. Build trusting relationships
      2. Career development
      3. Coaching and feedback
      4. Lead hiring
      5. Building communities of practice
    4. Supporting agile teams
      1. Removing obstacles, team by team
  4. Retrospective and debrief

Method Used

This workshop is interactive and experiential. You learn by doing and come away empowered to take the learning into practice in your project environment.

Every participant will receive a copy of Johanna’s Cutter IT Journal article Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership.

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