Is Management the Enemy of Agile?

Management is often ignored in the adoption of Agile software development. The usual messages are, "Self-organizing teams don't need managers," and "Management is an impediment," and "Managers are chickens." Unfortunately, these messages don't sell very well among managers. But the managers will have to pay the bills for Agile trainers and coaches. There are at least a hundred books for agile developers and project managers, but very few for agile managers and leaders. However, when organizations adopt agile software development, not only developers and project managers need to learn new practices. Development managers and team leaders must also learn a different approach to leading and managing organizations.

Several studies indicate that management is the biggest obstacle in transitions to agile software development. Managers need to learn what their new role is in software development organizations in the 21st century, and how to get the best out of Agile.

Measurements in Agile

Maciej a Krystian will focus in their speech on some aspects of agile transformation of the Nokia Siemens Networks. They will follow issues that arise with agile transformation in large corporation and will shoe examples on case of NWS LTE R&D department. It includes:

• Line organization vs. Project organization working in Agile mode.
• E2E responsibility for delivering potentially shippable product.
• Scaling the Scrum.

How to get at multi team agile project going - experience from PERFORM

How to act as Product Owner and prioritize with 12 scrum teams? How to get 12 teams to work towards the same goal without messing things up for each other? How to manage quality and how to define Done? In the speech you can learn about all this and relevant technical issues – continuous integration, environment for testing, refactoring and technical debt.

The Norwegian public service pension funds project to implement a new system for calculating pensions and payment of pensions for 15 bilion NKR every year ($2.5 billion). The project has lasted 3 years and is to be finished in December 2011. There is 160 persons working fulltime in the project – 100 of them in scrum teams. By now we have systems for 500 000 project hours already in production. The budget for the project is 1 bilion NKR. ($170 million).

The National Land Survey of Finland

The National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) is responsible for the majority of mapping and real estate related activities in Finland and has a strong in-house development unit employing 120 people.

Jani will give an overview of the challenges faced in traditional methods of software development and how Agile methods were called for the rescue.

It was not, however, trivial to deal with complexities of tendering legislation as well as the prevailing project culture at the NLS. Following the requirements of the INSPIRE directive and national legislation, the NLS is developing the Finnish National Geoportal called Paikkatietoikkuna.fi (translated as "spatial data window"). The pilot project started in 2009 and the first published version was developed by a multi-national software contractor using the traditional waterfall model.

As the project proceeded, it became apparent that especially in web development, using the latest open source technologies and tools that may change and develop very quickly, it is hard, or even unnecessary, to plan and design all the functionality ahead. Further, the requirements from INSPIRE legislation were repeatedly changed during the development process. Also, the traditional waterfall approach may become very expensive, as the software contractors often charge money when the requirements are changed, or even slightly altered.

In Finland and probably in many other European countries, the public procurement law is widely misunderstood in software contracting making agile approach practically impossible. However, as it turned out, the public procurement law can be fulfilled.

Paikkatietoikkuna.fi portal has been acknowledged as a significant success also outside of NLS. The portal won the Quality Innovation of the Year award 2010 in the category for public sector and non-profit corporations in a competition organized by Excellence Finland.

Agile development as it is seen by IBM

An epoch, when IBM was famous as a supplier of robust or heavy rigorous RUP methodology, became history long time ago. On the contrary, in recent years IBM intensively supports deployment of agile methodologies into corporate environment with its Jazz team platform. In short story we will have a look at methodical and philosophical attitude of IBM toward Agile and also at the third release of popular Rational Team Concert tool, which can be operated also in SCRUM mode.

I Want to go to Agile. Where is it?

Jarkko from Nokia Siemens Networks will tell us what were the goals for the agile transformation of their department three years ago and when the agile transformation started. Further he will say which methods were chosen to achieve these goals. We will also discuss how the chosen approaches worked and what would we do differently now.

This presentation is for managers and other process oriented people who have decided to improve their software development methods who have become interested in Agile, but don't know where and how to start the change. Nowadays there is a number of different methods that are called agile, and these methods should be used based on what is wanted to be achieved.

Impact of culture on development of agile leaders in Czech Republic, experiences and numbers

Cultural difference, legal environment and education have significant influence to adoption of agile methodologies and training of leaders. Michal will show us what are principles of agile management and why there is difficult to implement them in Czech Republic. He will show cases, where implementation succeeded.

Looking back at 4 agile years at Allianz

Dieter and Simon will summarize, what was achieved, what went wrong and where future is heading to in development department of Allianz insurance company in Germany. Visitors will learn how SCRUM implementation started and what problems had to be overcome by development and management teams when implementing SCRUM into large organization.