Agile2011 and Other Speaking Dates

Just an FYI… I had two talks selected for the big conference in Salt Lake City this year.  As always, I’m honored to get the opportunity to speak on such a large stage.  Here are the abstracts for the two talks that were selected:

Introduction to Agile Planning and Project Management

Agile introduces a number of tools and techniques designed to help the team figure out how much software we can build for the time we have, and the amount of money our customer is willing to spend. This talk will introduce the fundamental concepts necessary to break down and estimate our product backlog, how to organize delivery of that backlog for early risk reduction and rapid customer feedback, and how to get stable throughput and predictability as you mature your agile practices. This talk is for those looking to understand how (and why) agile methods lead to better business outcomes.

Exploring Enterprise Agile Transformation Strategies

The goal of any enterprise agile adoption strategy is NOT to adopt agile. Companies adopt agile to achieve better business outcomes. Large organizations have no time for dogma and one-size-fits-all thinking when it comes to introducing agile practices. These companies need pragmatic guidance for safely and incrementally introducing structure, principles, and ultimately practices that will result in greater long term, sustainable business results. This talk will introduce a framework for safely, pragmatically, and incrementally introducing agile to help you achieve your business goals.

The one talk that was not selected for the conference is getting a reprise at the 2nd Annual Southern Fried Agile conference as well as at the PMI Global Congress in October.

Blending Scrum and Kanban to Create an End-to-End Agile Enterprise

Large scale agile adoption requires top down intent, with bottom up implementation. We’ll explain how we transformed a 100 person company from ad-hoc and waterfall practices to a true end-to-end agile organization… inclusive of sales, marketing, and support. We’ll cover the initial assessment and organizational design, how we introduced team-based delivery practices, and put into place program and portfolio management to align all aspects of delivery to achieve business objectives. We’ll explain in detail the final state and the fundamental operational principles that make it all work.

One of my goals this year was to speak less and stay off the road… I’ve turned down more speaking opportunities than I’ve accepted.  Next year… I think I want to do a little more.  I missed not attending the LeanSSC show this year as well as both the ADP events. Anyway… this is it for me the rest of the year.  Hope to see you guys at one of these events.