In this session, we offer a synthesis of several bodies of thought that address processes, people, technology, change and leadership within the context of a large agile transition. While the competencies of agile development are well developed, the exploration and leveraging of other research on systemic change offers real insight to the complex organizational task of sustaining agile processes. We intend to fuse such research with our own experiences leading substantial agile transformations, to help senior leaders gain powerful new tools for leading their own agile transitions.

Could an executive team be happy using Scrum? Yes, it’s possible! Picture the scene: executives of strategic departments (financial, HR, IT, sales & marketing, production, etc.) being part of a cross-functional executive team…an executive Product Owner prioritizing an Executive Product Backlog that helps the team to follow the company’s vision. What are the main challenges of an executive ScrumMaster? In this session I will show a real case of a Brazilian company that uses Scrum in their executive team.

Agile fails without executive leadership. Although pockets of Agile can flourish for a while, only executives have the power to make an entire organization change.

The agile community has tried to sell executives on Agile rather than involve them. This workshop involves participants in discovering and documenting patterns for Agile executives to use. It builds on our previously-presented CTO research.

This session is appropriate for executives with Agile experience and for gurus who commonly work with executives. Others should wait for the results.

By now, your company has made the transition to Agile. “Sprints”, “backlogs”, and “retrospectives” are everyday words, but you’re also discovering the serious challenges that software agility brings to product management. The Product Owners, who have been scattered across multiple teams, are not cohesively aligned around the same prioritized set of corporate initiatives and strategies. In addition, there are cross-product dependencies that are not being effectively recognized and addressed. My company’s solution was to build a single, enterprise level, Unified Backlog.