As timelines on application development and delivery continue to shorten, it’s no longer enough just to ask folks to work faster. Many managers are stuck between missing deadlines or burning out their people.

This was just one of the challenges for Promontory Interfinancial Network when it chose to implement Agile Portfolio Management over three years ago to speed the deployment of new financial technology software in an IT division of over 80 employees. Since its implementation, the number successful projects has more than doubled and late-stage overload has essentially been eliminated. Along with improving productivity, project visibility, resource allocation, and clarity of prioritization, the process has also been a highlight in audits and examinations as it demonstrates management oversight and risk mitigation.

In this session, Simon Storm, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications at Promontory, and the project lead in implementing Agile Portfolio Management, shares learnings from the implementation by the IT Management Team. He discusses how to get management buy-in, tips for customizing the Agile process for your institution, and his insights of how spearheading the Agile process can significantly advance your career by putting yourself in the driver’s seat of improving your organization’s productivity and collaboration.

While many companies are adopting Agile development practices, it is fascinating how most of the management team in these companies are still starting trying to budget and plan in one year increments. Budget and planning starts in the fall and managers are literally guessing what they will need and what they are going to be working on 12 months down the road. It is inevitable that within the first few months of the plan there is going to a major event that is going make the plan completely irrelevant. It could be a new project that came out of nowhere, an issue with a major application that needs all hands to address, or the simple fact that as the team has completed work throughout the year, what was important at the beginning of the year is no longer important. 

In this talk we will share the experiences of the IT management team of a small financial services firm that took a conference room and Scrum and found a way to improve throughput, increase visibility, and improve coordination across IT, all while delivering projects, responding to auditors and growing the company's product portfolio. 

Are you struggling to implement Agile at your company?  What could be better than to learn from someone who has done it wrong over and over! We want to share our experiences pioneering Agile at a FinTech company.  After multiple attempts and through sheer stubbornness, we were we able to get it right and improve our release pace by 650% annually.  We will walk through where we went wrong, what we did right, and why we now understand that Agile cannot be successful without profound collaboration, Continuous Delivery, a DevOps culture and a desire to continuously improve.

Agile emphasizes self managing teams that regularly change how they work to improve productivity. Auditors and examiners want to ensure that management is actively providing oversight and that the team is following a consistent and repeatable development process. Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code requires operations engineers to commit code into source code control systems and it encourages developers to have sufficient access to help troubleshoot production problems. Meanwhile, auditors and examiners are strong believers in separation of duties. These are just a few examples of how new development processes are creating serious challenges for audited and regulated companies. Given the conflicting priorities, how is a highly regulated or audited company supposed to implement either Agile or Continuous delivery without violating the core principles of these development approaches?

In this talk we will review 25 actionable items to help position Agile and Continuous Delivery so that your next audit is a success. Come with your own challenges as well as items that you are implementing so that the discussion period at the end of the presentation can include a meaningful session on additional tips and tricks you are employing or find solutions to your particular challenges.