On August 11th, 2010, I presented at the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida on Accelerating Your Organization's Agile Adoption.  This particular topic is one that I've been refining over a number of years on how to effectively scale Agile techniques and principles across large, enterprise organization's.  Some of you might remember my blog entry last year which described a framework for measuring agile maturity across your organization by assessing the skills of individuals as they develop and apply Agile skills.  This presentation explores the framework I described earlier and addresses some common challenges of Agile adoption particularly as it individuals move from 'learning' an Agile principle to actually 'applying' these techniques in a project session.  In addition, the presentation covers some of the core principles that Agile espouses and how these add value to an organization. 

One of the more engaging aspects of the presentation is a collection of 'problem scenarios', each centered on a different team member who exhibits some behaviors that challenge the agile adoption principles that were presented.  Presentation participants will be broken into small teams to review and discuss the scenarios and then the different approaches will be reviewed and discussed.   Each of these problem scenarios can be mapped back to the agile maturity framework and participants can develop ideas on how to avoid these situations when they apply Agile techniques in their own organizations.

You can download a .zip file of presentation, the problem scenarios and a reference sheet by click on this link.

I recently completed four presentations at the Project Management Institute Houston Conference in Houston, Texas.  It was a great conference with more than 600 attendees.  I was able to present in each of the major topic tracks within the conference (which might be a new record there).  The topics were Enterprise Implementations of Software-As-A-Service Solutions: An Experience Report, Accelerating Your Organization's Agile Adoption, Software-as-a-Service Portfolio Management Approaches, Leveraging Social Collaboration Tools for Effective Project Management.  I had the pleasure of presenting these topics with several colleagues, Robbie Mac Iver, Alan Birchenough and Sudev Vasudevan.  You can access the presentations by clicking on the links above.

Abstract
This paper presents the results of a web services application development project using the Rational Unified Process (RUP) combined with elements of eXtreme Programming (XP). Developed for an international financial services company, the web-based application, called the Property Re-Insurance System, automates the reinsuring of property policies. The client chose this high profile, e-commerce project for the initial use of an iterative software development process consisting of the Rational Unified Process supplemented with some principles of eXtreme Programming, (e.g., paired programming and unit testing). Successfully completed on time and within budget, this experience suggests the Rational Unified Process and eXtreme Programming are complementary development processes that can be effectively applied to internet applications where time-to-market is a critical measure of success. Nevertheless, there is potential for significant improvement in the areas of: definition, duration and sequencing of process activities; choice of documentation artifacts; and, use of automated tools.