"A is for Agile, the start of something good!" Agile Academy Meetup 21/4/2010

Philip Abernathy, an Agile expert with over 28 years of general IT, consultant and management experience with blue chip companies in the IT international arena presented at the most recent  Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup . He has been practising and preaching Agile for the last 12 years.  Philip’s strong message about starting out in the Agile space, was - that you have to get it “right from the start”, so he gave a brief history of the Agile Manifesto and then focussed on the essential values and principles that drive the hands-on practices of Agile and what that means in providing strong business value. 

Philip happily talked about a range of topics the audience indicated at the beginning of the night that they were keen to hear about including –
 
  • How to “sell” the idea of Agile projects to the business;
  • Agile and PRINCE2 – friends or enemies;
  • Agile Governance;
  • Agile interdependencies with other Agile and Waterfall projects; and
  • How Usability Experience Design and Agile work together.
He also provided some choice takeaways for the audience, some of which were:

  • Training and coaching are an essential combination to address the change management journey so don’t forget “Troaching”;
  • Automated testing is essential to the heart of Agile;
  • If you can talk to your stakeholders and find out their ‘pain point’ and then express how Agile can fix or remove these, you will get business on board; and
  • In fact once Business gets on board they love it because they have absolute control and absolute transparency.  It is sometimes the IT team that holds back.
For more takeaways and the full presentation please see below.

'A is for Agile, the start of something good!' from Agile Academy on Vimeo.

 

'A is for Agile, the start of something good!
For more information about more Agile training, insights and Meetups Agile just go to http://www.agileacademy.com.au/agile or if you are interested in reading more about past and upcoming Meetups please click here. They are usually great evenings of thought–provoking ideas, discussion and networking with like–minded Agile (and Agile-curious) professionals at all levels on knowledge of experience from novice to expert.