October Chapter Event - Agile Analysis in a non-Agile World - Al Shalloway - Net Objectives

What do you do when you want to "go agile" but not all of the folks in your company are interested? Net Objectives has been assisting organizations become Agile for over a decade. While many times the transition of an organization is done holistically, just as often it is not. We often see teams moving to Agile while the business side does not. What do you do if you can't take on one of the more popular Agile approaches such as Scrum, Kanhban Method or SAFe but want at least your group to improve?

Interestingly enough, we have found that the guiding principles we use when an entire organization wants to go Agile can be used when even just a part wants to go Agile. The reason is that principles represent fundamental truths in software development. While Scrum, Kanban Method and SAFe, are based in principles they are usually implemented as collections of practies intended to achieve certain results. Underlying these practices in that the entire group for which the framework/method was designed is going Agile.

Fortunatly, there are certain laws of software development that are valid everywhere. This talk presents several foundational truths, or principles of software development as it relates to Agile analysis. By attending to these, one can improve one's approach regardless of who you are interacting with. These include:

* Why "just in time" is a Lean truth we all need to understand

* Why local optimizations rarely help delivering business value

* Why smaller, more frequent, is better. Introducing Minimal Business Increments.

* Why working on too many things not only makes us inefficient, it creates additional work for us to do.

By addressing these "laws" we can come up with practices that business analysts can follow in any situation. These include:

* Understanding minimal business increments (MBI's, also called minimal viable products - MVPs)

* Why everyone should be using test-first methods and how business analysts can enforce this

* How to write stories to provide quicker feedback.

In this talk we will learn how to use these practices whether the rest of the organization is going Agile or not. In the process, we will also discover how we can influence an organization to become more Agile.

Speaker Bio: Al Shalloway

Al is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, SAFe, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise wide as well as teaches courses in these areas. Al is a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer as well as a co-founder of Lean Kanhban University (no current affiliation) and the Lean Systems Society of which he is a current board member. AL has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped Net Objectives clients achieve long-term sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of books on design patterns, enterprise agile, scrum and agile design. Al has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University.

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