Overcoming Common PITFALLs in Your Agile Transformation with Bill DeVoe

VERY IMPORTANT INFO
The group will be meeting in a new location this month. Please come to Splunk+VictorOps at 1401 Pearl St. in downtown Boulder (the old Cheesecake Factory location). This is not a permanent location but we will no longer be meeting at the former Rally/CA/Broadcom location.

Agenda:
6-6:30 Arrival and Networking
6:30-7:45 Topic Discussion
7:45-8:00 Wrap Up

Creating a sustainable transformation is possible for every organization and company, but there are many pitfalls and obstacles. Some are obvious (not getting the right people to lead it) and some aren’t (do your budgeting and performance review systems undermine agility?). What matters is knowing what some of those pitfalls are, how to identify when you’ve come across one, and what you need to do to overcome it.

In my years of supporting and leading transformations, I’ve pretty much seen it all. From a VP of IT who wants to know “when we’ll be done with this whole agile thing” to finance teams requiring bottoms-up annual budgeting for projects to executives who think that it’s just everyone else who needs to change. But it’s not just about seeing these problems - it’s about knowing how to overcome them. How do you convince that executive that they’re going to have to make changes to support your transformation? How do you convince finance to start funding long-lived teams? And how do you help that VP of IT understand that we won’t be “done” with agile - that this is the new way of working?

In this talk, we’ll review my own real-world experiences and cases of common transformation pitfalls, how to avoid them, and - most importantly - how to overcome them to get the treasure, just like PITFALL Harry.

Bio:
Bill DeVoe has been in IT for almost 30 years and has spent 20 years of that as an agile practitioner, educator, and coach. He has a diverse background and has introduced and adapted agile processes with everything from Fortune 10 companies to small startups. He knows what it's like to be working in agile shops as a developer in the trenches, a manager, and senior manager. He is an experienced enterprise agile transformation coach and educator (especially SAFe) and has many years of experience in distributed agile development. His company - Artemis Agile Consulting - specializes in leading and coaching agile transformations.

He is a Certified Scrum Professional, a SAFe Program Consultant, and licensed Management 3.0 Facilitator.