How can teams that have to deal with large, complex legacy systems get through planning and get to work? The Exorcist was a master at this.

Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.

Introducing Regan McNeil: Poor Regan McNeil was starting go insane, but a team of doctors and specialists in close, face-to-face collaboration, couldn't solve her problem.

The Exorcist: The Exorcist knew how to have just enough conversation to get to work, so his team could deliver the value everyone had been working and praying for.

Summary: "In life, understanding is the booby prize". Sometimes the quest for understanding can be an impediment to delivering value. Having faith in self-organization, sometimes its best just to get to work

Culture existed before Agile. Culture also existed before what is now known as "organizational" or "corporate culture". Outside of the world of global enterprises and systems, culture within a society helps define what it means to be human. Within a societal culture, individuals and interactions really are valued over processes and tools.

Alas, much of the conversation about "culture" for agile teams focuses on how to design or change organizational culture to make it support agile practices. From this perspective, if you have the wrong culture, agile won't thrive.  To have the "right" culture, many organizations adopt scaling or adoption frameworks that create rules around communication and collaboration that ignore how people live and communicate with each other naturally.

What if traditions of a local culture are forces that actually help support communication within a global program that uses agile? What if people bringing traditions from their own culture can create something global and distributed that's more valuable than if they worked on their own?

This talk will explore how the simple principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto create a space where people local living in local cultures can contribute greatly to global agility. 

How can teams that have to deal with large, complex legacy systems get through planning and get to work? The title character of the classic American horror film, "The Exorcist" was a master at this..

Pecha Kucha Talk Summary:

• Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.
  
  
• Introducing Regan McNeil: Poor Regan McNeil was starting go insane, but a team of doctors and specialists in close, face-to-face collaboration, couldn't solve her problem.
  
  
• The Exorcist: The Exorcist knew how to have just enough conversation to get to work, so his team could deliver the value everyone had been working and praying for.
  
  
• Summary: "In life, understanding is the booby prize". Sometimes the quest for understanding can be an impediment to delivering value. Having faith in self-organization, sometimes its best just to get to work.

Core Agile practices establish visibility, remove impediments, and promote collaboration at the team level. Standup meetings, physical task boards, and focus on clearing impediments are well known practices to keep a team focused on the work, and establish a sense of flow towards frequent, tangible, and sustainable results.

What about an entire program, when a large number of teams are involved? How can a large organization exploit the same core practices when there is highly interdependent work, and when there may be hundreds of people involved? How can Scrum be used to improve delivery times, increase quality, and promote sustainable development at a program level? How the can practices provide executive leadership the visibility they need into program progress?

This workshop will introduce valuable, proven Scrum practices for large programs. Among the topics that will be discussed are:

• What program management challenges are ripe for improvement through Agile practices?

• The Program Impediment Board: Visible impediments, dependencies and milestones at a program level

• The Program Stand-up: Lightweight activities to promote visibility, clear impediments and collaboration across the program

• What does it look like when it’s working?: Improve delivery time, increase quality, and establish collaboration across the organization.