Timetable Sydney SDC Transforming Analysis

9:00-10:10
Thursday 24 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Creating an Adaptable Life

Johanna Rothman
Rothman Consulting Group (USA)
http://www.jrothman.com/

Change happens to us all the time. Normally, it happens so slowly that we don't particularly notice. Sometimes the change happens so quickly that we do notice.

My life changed in September 2009. With sudden hearing loss and constant vertigo, life became more challenging. I learned to ask for help; to accept that I can't control everything; to see what's really going on; to see the current state and to envision where I want to go. I'm adapting how I work, live and travel so that I can be successful. Things have changed; adapting has allowed me to continue to live, work and enjoy my life.

In whatever way your organisation is growing and evolving your role and activities will change.
Irrespective of what drives the changes you in your role must adapt to the new challenges. It may be a move to Agile or working with partners and other teams who are adopting new ways of working. For some these changes and challenges may be subtle. For others, such as BAs and PMs moving to Agile, the change can feel like a 2 by 4 that connects with your head! How do you adapt to ensure continued success?  

I'll discuss change, how you can use it to create an adaptable life, and how you can make choices that can work for you and your organisation.

About Johanna: An internationally recognised expert in managing IT product and software development. She helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She has written a number of popular books. Her most recent book is "Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects" more >>>

10:30-11:30
Thursday 24 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Agile Grows Up

Steve Adolph
Agile Coach, Rally Software (USA)
http://www.rallydev.com/

An introduction to scaling Agile software development methods.  

"Oh Agile is great for six or seven people, but it won't work for a real project" is a criticism often heard by those proposing Agile methods. After all, many of the more widely known Agile methods make some very specific assumptions about the development environment: small co-located teams, on site customer, and emergent architecture.

Does this mean larger projects cannot be Agile projects because these assumptions are not usually valid for larger projects? Absolutely not!

Agile thought leaders and many large Agile teams have demonstrated that Agile methods scale by adding best practices to address scaling issues. But how is an effective analysis or architectural process incorporated into the fast paced Agile world? Unfortunately the Agile methods themselves provide little guidance for scaling and this often leaves growing projects floundering as they re-invent and re-discover the practices necessary to support their growth.

There have been past attempts to create scalable software methods but often these methods required a skilled software process engineer intimately familiar with a complex method to “tailor it down”. Often those scaling the process were reluctant to throw out practices they might need and the result was often small and medium projects burdened with a method suitable for constructing a national air traffic control system.

We will offer a better approach by starting with the simplest process possible  - but no simpler - adapting the method to the project context and letting the method grow and adapt as the project itself evolves.  

About Steve:  He is active in the Agile community, is the co-founder of Agile Vancouver and was a track producer for the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. Steve is an Agile Coach with Rally Software and is co-author of the book "Patterns for Effective Use Cases" more >>>

11:50-3:10 (incl Lunch)
Thursday 24 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Writing Good User Stories: The Key to Defining Agile Requirements

Shane Hastie
Chief Knowledge Engineer, Software Education (NZ/AU)
http://www.softed.com

This session is for anyone who needs to define requirements using User Stories. 

User Stories are the most common technique for requirements identification and management on many Agile projects.  User Stories are a great tool, and have been used very effectively for over 10 years now.  In concept User Stories are very simple - define the business need in a single sentence so it can be prioritised and ranked and then used to drive the development of the product. In practice building good User Stories is hard, but well worth the effort.

Poor stories result in poor understanding of customer needs and will burden your projects with unnecessary churn and potentially lead the project team down a path that very efficiently solves the wrong business problem. Learning the art of writing good User Stories can vastly improve the value of your requirements definition leading to smoother and more successful projects.

Shane will take you through a structured process for identifying User Stories, discuss the characteristics of good stories, common mistakes and anti-patterns of bad stories and then introduce you to the overall lifecycle of a story in an Agile project.

The major focus of the workshop is to give you tools to identify and prepare good User Stories as a starting point for an Agile project. The topics to be dealt with in depth are:

• Introducing User Stories.
• Techniques for identifying User Stories.
• The difference between Stories and Epics and when to use both.
• How to use  the INVEST criteria to develop good User Stories.
• The “Three C's” of a story.

The session will be very hands-on, with participants working in groups to identify, improve and prioritise stories for a case study project.

The identification of stories is not the end of the life for a story.  Shane will discuss the lifecycle of a story over an Agile project and discuss how stories iteratively evolve through the project activities - identification, prioritisation, estimation, elaboration, development and testing.

About Shane: A member of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Agile Alliance. Shane is a frequent speaker at industry events, a trained personal development coach and is currently contributing to the IIBA®  BABOK® agile-extension more >>> 

11:50-3:10 (incl Lunch)
Thursday 24 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Keeping Your Neck: Product Owner Success Strategies

Steve Adolph
Agile Coach, Rally Software (USA)
http://www.rallydev.com/

Strategies and guidelines to become a better Product Owner. 

While the "single wringable neck" is a less than flattering description of the Product Owner, it does emphasise the importance of this crucial role. The Product Owner is one of the most influential roles on the product team and takes on much of the responsibility for successful value delivery to the customer.

Without skilled direction and support from great Product Owners, great development teams may create great software only to discover they have created the wrong product.

So what are the skills and strategies great Product Owners should know?  This workshop helps the Product Owner “keep their neck”. Using a set of exercises, simulations and reflection, participants learn strategies for becoming successful Product Owners.

Specific topics covered include:

• Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
• Don't go dark!
• Knowing your boundaries while being there for your colleagues.
• Working effectively with epics and stories.
• Grooming the backlog.
• When is a story ready, and when is it done?
• Working with multiple Product Owners.  

About Steve:  He is active in the Agile community, is the co-founder of Agile Vancouver and was a track producer for the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. Steve is an Agile Coach with Rally Software and is co-author of the book "Patterns for Effective Use Cases" more >>>

3:30-4:20 
Thursday 24 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Implementing Transformational Change in a Commercial Environment  

Jenny Saunders  
Farm Systems Software Manager, Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) (NZ)  
http://www.lic.co.nz

A real-life experience talk of the journey travelled from a traditional waterfall development methodology to adopting a combination of “Agile” approaches.

Market demands and external pressures meant that LIC needed to continually assess the way that they developed software. With the realisation that they were successful in software product development came the expectation and desire to “do better”. LIC is simply not happy to just plod along.

“We needed to be delivering 'Faster, Better, Cheaper', and to add in the softer side of 'Happy people, sustainable workload and a fun environment' to our work place.” 

Was this possible in a commercial world?

Jenny will provide a “real life experience” of the journey that LIC has travelled in changing from a traditional waterfall development methodology to adopting a combination of “Agile” approaches; there will be no hidden secrets!

In this presentation, Jenny will look at the difficulties and provide hints & tips to help you on your way in a commercial software development environment.

She'll look cover the following areas:

• Why change something that isn't broken?
• Identification of the “right” agile practices.
• Managing transitions in areas such as BAU, roles, adoption and training.
• Continuous Improvement: Still climbing to new heights!”

Jenny notes that: “We haven't reached the top of Everest yet but we're doing pretty well; currently at Camp V and making a push for Camp VI and then the final summit.”

Don't miss out on the combination of transformational “real-life experiences”. Even if you are not involved in a “commercial” environment you are bound to pick up tips that will be applicable across “non-commercial” groups.  

About Jenny: Within LIC, Jenny is charged with managing the Farm Systems Software Development Group. The group that is responsible for delivering, maintaining and supporting LIC's customer facing software technology products  more about Jenny >>> 

9:00-10:00
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Strategically Speaking: Why Are We Doing This?

Kent J. McDonald
Knowledge Bridge Partners (USA)
http://www.knowledgebridgepartners.com

How Business Analysts can increase their understanding of organisational strategy and use it to really analyse the business.

Have you ever asked “why is the company working on this project?”  If so, what did you do about it?  Business Analysts actually have at their disposal a full set of tools to help an organisation convert strategy to reality.

This keynote will discuss how business analysts can utilise their tool set, categorised as Enterprise Analysis by the BABOK®, to:

• Understand how their project supports the organisation's strategy.
• Help their team members understand this tie.
• Utilise that tie to guide day to day decisions on the project.

This session will also cover what to do if you find yourself on a project that does not appear to align with organisational strategy, and how to add even more value by helping avoid this situation in the first place.

About Kent: Kent specialises in successfully applying pragmatic approaches to strategic planning and coaching business analysts and project managers. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, a book that brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help organisations deliver business value and build competitive advantage more >>>  

10:15-11:15
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Does Agile Analysis Require a Business Analyst?

Kurt Solarte
Certified Managing Consultant, IBM Rational Software (AU)
http://www.ibm.com/au/en/

As more and more organisations take on Agile Methodology, a whole practice of Traditional Business Analysts find themselves questioning their place in this new world. This talk explores how important and relevant business analysis is within agile methods, and how that relevance translates into the need for Business Analysts, in role if not in name.

I walk through the adoption of agile methods by many of the web consultancies in the US and the transformations that these consultancies' Business Analysts are undergoing to stay relevant in the new space. 

About Kurt: Currently focusing on Agile Development and Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management, Kurt seven years with IBM Global Business Services in the US as a Certified Managing Consultant and Sr. Business Analyst where he specialised in Agile delivery of eCommerce, web portal, and business analytics projects  more >>>  

11:15-12:00
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

"The Business: Do I Really Need to Talk to Them?" - The “Sheldon Cooper” Story 

Karina Irving 
Business Solutions Manager, Downer EDI Mining (AU) 
http://www.downergroup.com/Divisions/Mining/

Many of you will be familiar with the character Sheldon Cooper in the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Sheldon is the ultimate geek. He has an IQ of 187, two PhDs, an extensive general knowledge and expert knowledge of his chosen domain.  Despite his intelligence, Sheldon is usually inept in most social and business situations.

I'm sure many of you can easily recognise a Sheldon Cooper or two in your own organisation and have struggled to get their smooth collaboration with your business partners.

And it's that collaboration - the talking and the partnerships - that we all understand as so important in developing successful products today. It may not surprise you to learn that the sitcoms creators modelled the Sheldon Cooper character on a computer programmer they knew.

Let me introduce you to my Sheldon Cooper - Andrew.

Andrew was an analyst programmer within my team.  He loved his job. The things that he could design, build, and create amazed me everyday. 

Andrew lived a true programmer's life - arriving at work at 11am, and loving the quiet time of the evenings, working long past 7pm.

I asked Andrew to commence work by 9am so that he was more available to the business; his reply, “I'm a programmer; I don't need to be here for the business. If the specifications are documented incorrectly then that's not my problem.”

If I was ever going to get any meaningful interaction and dialogue happening between Andrew and the business it was clear that using a Big Bang theory was not going to work.

Andrew's journey to “talking with them” was one I took him on by stealth. By the end of the journey, Andrew was presenting his new product at an international conference with his business partners.

I will share with you Andrew's story and some of the tips and tricks that I learnt along the way to getting the talking and collaborating working. It's my hope that you can find here some take away points that you can use to help the Sheldon's that you work with to really get talking with your business partners and visa-versa.

About Karina: In her role, Karina works closely with software development teams to ensure delivery of products that meet customer requirements and business needs. She is continually meeting the challenge to get programmers, business analysts and project managers to always be talking with the business more >>>  

1:00-3:30
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Is It Worth It: Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions

Kent J. McDonald
Knowledge Bridge Partners (USA)
http://www.knowledgebridgepartners.com

How to develop a business case in the form of a value model that can be used throughout the project to make decisions.

One trait of an effective business analyst is the ability to ask the right questions.  One “right” question that applies to just about all projects can sometimes be difficult to ask, let alone answer: “Is it worth it?”  This question is difficult to answer, because the answer will change as you proceed through the project and gain more knowledge about the purpose, considerations, costs and benefits involved in a project.

In this session, we'll explore a tool you can use to help organise the necessary information to answer the “is it worth it?” question on a regular basis.  This interactive session will simulate several stages in a project's lifecycle to demonstrate how you can create a value model to make an initial decision about whether to pursue a project, and then utilise that model as your knowledge grows throughout the project to revisit the question and confirm whether the project is on the right course, or if changes need to be made.

Topics discussed during the session include:

• The benefit of using multiple measures (NPV, ROI, TCO, IRR) in combination to get a full picture of the financial characteristics of a project.
• Structuring your value model to show the feature's impact on the value provided by the whole.
• The costs and benefits that you have to consider, not only during the project, but ongoing. 
• The impact of timing of implementation on the Cost/Benefit discussion.  

About Kent: Kent specialises in successfully applying pragmatic approaches to strategic planning and coaching business analysts and project managers. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, a book that brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help organisations deliver business value and build competitive advantage more >>>  

1:00-2:05
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Agile Field Reports and Experiences of a BA through an Agile Lens

Michael Stange and Daragh Farrell
Suncorp (AU)
http://www.suncorp.com.au

The world of a Business Analyst and their role in an Agile environment seems to be a moving feast.  What we would like to share is some of our experiences and insights as coaches working with BAs and Agile teams. We will also have some Business Analysts sharing their own unique Agile experiences and insights through case studies/reports. Our aim is to share, generate discussions and explore the challenges of business analysts looking through an Agile lens.

About Michael and Daragh: Michael and Daragh are Agile Coaches with Suncorp  more >>>

2:20-3:30
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

The Clinic

Johanna Rothman & Shane Hastie
Rothman Consulting & Software Education (AU)
http://www.jrothman.com/   http://www.softed.com

This session allows you to workshop consult with two leading practitioners and trainers in the Agile, Project and People management spaces today. Johanna and Shane will consider a few key issues that face project success regarding Agile Development and Team Dynamics and invite you to bring up any issues you may be facing. Together you'll explore possible solutions drawing on Johanna and Shane's vast experience across dozens of projects and collaborations worldwide within organisations large and small, private and public.     

More about Johanna and Shane

3:50-4:50
Friday 25 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Sydney

Who's On Your Team?

Johanna Rothman
Rothman Consulting Group (USA)
http://www.jrothman.com/

You've probably heard the old joke about “who's on first?” where Abbot and Costello manage to talk past each other to discuss the makeup of a baseball team. Have you ever felt a little like that when you try to organise a team in your organisation?

If so, maybe it's time to rethink how you create teams. It's not that the names or titles of the people are confusing - it's much more often the issue of what kinds of talents, skills and experience you want on a team.

When it's time to select team members, whether you are hiring new people or organising a team from members already inside the organisation, you want to consider the cultural issues, the kinds of experience people have had in the past and what they don't know. You also want to consider personality diversity and cultural fit. And, of course, you do want to consider technical skill fit.

Johanna will discuss each of these issues and help you see how to define what you need, and how to determine if a potential candidate has the right stuff to be on your team.

About Johanna: An internationally recognised expert in managing IT product and software development. She helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She has written a number of popular books. Her most recent book is "Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects" more >>>