Southern Fried Agile Proposed Topics

Some of you may find interest in the topics I proposed for Southern Fried Agile.  I may or may not 'get' any of these....

• Culture, Change, Scrum: What we can do about it

This is an evolving topic for me.  I spoke on this same basic topic last time, and people seemed to be pretty interested.  This time it will be different. My plan may vary, depending on which other speakers come (for example, if Mary Lynn Manns comes). My current plan is to focus mainly on two sub-topics: what is culture and how to use Open Agile Adoption. Here is my current 'extended' slide deck on this subject: http://www.slideshare.net/jhlittle

• A patterns approach to Scaling

I will describe why I prefer a patterns approach to scaling.  That is, why I do not prefer a monolithic approach, but rather prefer to do scale iteratively and incrementally. We will discuss some key terms associated with scaling. We will discuss the logic behind using patterns. We will review the basic and classic patterns for scaling. We will discuss the main sources for patterns of scaling (ScrumPLOP.org, SAFe, LeSS, etc.) Most importantly, we will discuss how you can take action on these ideas on Monday.

• Agile Release Planning: One approach

This is an important topic for virtually every team.  How to do the initial Agile Release Planning (usually covering more than one release). In this short session I will describe one simple approach that addresses many issues. One the key thing:  this approach has different main goals than what you probably expect.  It's main goal is to change the people -- get them on the same page, get them motivated, get them to share the tacit knowledge (or 'negative' knowledge) they already have about the work, and share that with the others involved in the work. In the session I will quickly describe the main steps I use, and also some detailed techniques. We will also discuss Release Plan Refactoring.  This is similar to what many people call Product Backlog grooming or Backlog refinement. Due to the timebox of this session, we will touch very quickly on how to do this in a scaled environment. I hope this will be an interactive session for a relatively small group, so we can discuss this very interesting topic. This topic is related to my book, Joe's Agile Release Planning. *** I can probably arrange to speak on these topics at your company or at your user group.