Agile in Education: How agile is empowering teachers and principles in the Northern Territory
This is a story of agile adoption outside of the traditional environment of agile teams. The NT eDash program is about empowering educators in the NT by providing them with access to data to support their decision making. This talk describes how a mixture of design thinking, agile and analytical tools have brought about change in an environment where it really matters.
The eDash program faced a number of challenges including the need to make sure that principals and teachers in remote communities had a voice in the priorities of the project. Similarly it was vital to make sure that the solution developed would be enthusiastically adopted by educators across the NT. This was an organisation new to agile and under pressure to deliver from within and externally.
Despite these and many other hurdles the NT Education department, partnering with Aginic, have delivered a product that has generated excitement amongst the NT teaching community and has already begun bringing about small positive improvements to education across the territory.
We will be sharing our lessons learned and our success stories in bringing about a shift in mindset that allowed NT Education to embrace a new way of working and achieve such a fantastic outcome for teachers and principals.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
This will be a joint presentation from myself and Shannon Russell from NT Education, Shannon is a former teacher and the Product Owner of eDash. We'll be sharing practical examples of how scrum principles helped generate change for teachers by giving them a voice in the development process that they'd never experienced before.
Learning Outcome
Attendees will be given practical examples of establishing successful agile teams and how to embed design thinking principles into a project to ensure that the end customer is a constant focus.
Target Audience
Anyone new to agile or in need of an uplifting tale of success :)
